You Want A Bit Of Everything In Terms Of Pearls, Sir, but Absolutely No Swine - Did I Get That Correctly?

Well, of course you do, 'cause that's what's on the menu today, lovingly cooked up as usual by le chef lui-même. For our latest adventure in All Pearls, No Swine land we go back to the 80s, and if you thought that past editions from that period could be eclectic, whoo boy, do we have some eclecticism for you in store today. All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 24 really has a bit of everything, starting with the slightly jangly underground pop of The Mahoney Brothers' "Don't Freeze Me Out" and ending 78 minutes later with Geoffrey W. Newhall's ambient/new age instrumental "Butterfly". In between you get an unlikely reggae-soul hybrid from Dede Higgins with "One Thing For Certain", atmospheric new wave from Jackie Leven and his cohorts in Doll By Doll with "Under My Thumb", groovy rock from beloved vets Little Feat via an outtake from Down On The Farm, throwback 60's-style garage rock from The Optic Nerve, and Christian folk-pop by Aina. And that's just the first seven songs! 

So, yeah, diversity is the name of the game here, no doubt about it. We also get some Oz rock courtesy of Australian Crawl (below) immortalizing the "Daughters Of The North Coast", country-pop from The Maines Brothers' having lovely "Dreams Of Desirée", hard to categorize (outsider folk rock?) but really cool stuff from virtual unknowns The Freemasons, moody rock from Uncle Friday and the return of power popper de luxe Jonathan Kupersmith! 

And the list goes on and on. We have some mainstream-ish artists making an appearance like Spirit with their remake of "1984" and the Go-Go's with their demo of classic "Lust For Love". And then there's new wave/electro-poppers Commuter with the bubbly "Young Hearts" (Cobra Kai influence, natch!) and Canadian's Depeche Mode Strange Currencies with the beautiful and uncharacteristic (acoustic guitars!) "This Island Earth", as well as one of Britain's premier alternative rock outfits, The House Of Love. 

When they say there is something for everyone here, what that sometimes means is that there's nothing for no one. But not with our All Pearls, No Swine, of course, where treasure hunters will be rewarded with a ton of cool music and acts with varying degrees of being known. So, dive into this veritable smorgasboard of cool-sounding goodies from the decade that gets better with every year in the retrospective mirror...

This Just In: Alright, she finally got her mantlepieces...

Yippee, Yahoo, jubilation and celebration in the land. Queen Bey finally did it. The question of when Beyoncé was finally going to win a Grammy for Album Of The Year (and not Record Of The Year which she had already won) had become a recurring phenomenon with a bunch of mor or less well done discussions including a bunch of subtext about race, racism, musical genres and a ton of other stuff attached. Not to mention that her miss in that category in 2010 being the spark that ignited the infamous Taylor Swift - Kanye West feud. So, now she finally got the one price she - or at least her fans - most craved. Good on her. 

The Grammies of course totally suck at being any kind of arbiter of taste, usually going with the safest choice, which - even if they embrace what the kids these days listen to, as evidenced by victories by Billie EIlish and Harry Styles - they usually go with what sells. Which made the 2001's Grammies one of the funniest when it seemed all but certain that Eminem would win for The Marshall Mathers Album with a historic first victory for a rap album, only to see two sarcastic middle-aged gentlemen walk on stage and celebrate the upset win of Steely Dan's Two Against Nature. But yeah, Beyoncé took chances last year with Cowboy Carter and it paid off and that's a nice happy end for her.  

Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter also won Best Country Album, a historic first for a black woman in what feels at least partly like a political decision, considering the unease with which the country community reacted to Beyoncé's genre overtures and being shut out at the CMA Awards last year for that very album. The now Grammy-winning Cowboy Carter is still messy and  unwieldy as all hell, that's why I take this news item as a way to hawk my improved (via substraction) version of said record, Saddle Up. The original write-up is here, but a new link will be below. Saddle Up focuses on the country part of the genre-crashing original and is also a lot more digestible, running for half of the original's unreasonable 78 minute running time.

I'd venture most of you aren't huge Beyoncé fans and guess what, neither am I, but I still thought it was worth to take a shot at improving her country album. Now it's up to you (if you didn't back in April 2024) to give this a shot. Get your six guns and saddle up with Beyoncé. 

 

In Dreams...And Nightmares...He Walked With Us

When I posted my first little tribute to David Lynch, I could post something the moment I heard the news because the album had already been edited, and so had the album art, so I just needed to do my write-up and post the whole shebang. But I wasn't quite done, as with Françoise Hardy last year, where I did a stopgap release when I heard about her death, then got to work to do a home-cooked compilation. Though I must've had much more time then, as both posts were just 24 hours apart. It took me a good while longer to do a David Lynch project that would do the man, his work, and most of all the music in it justice. 

I wanted to do essentially a mixtape-style compilation  of the songs and score tracks I mostly associate with Lynch, in a sequencing that would hopefully weave and waver like Lynch's films did. Then, when I had a whole 25-track comp ready to go - tagged, bagged, artwork-stacked - I realized I had not included Connie Stevens' "Sixteen Reasons", a track featured in Mulholland Drive, but not on its soundtrack. So I went back to the drawing board, recovered a couple of other things from the cutting room floor and finally arrived at this, a 30 track, 78-minute trip through the musical mind and imagination of David Keith Lynch, In Dreams I Walk With You - A Musical Journey Through Lynch Land.  

In dreams, David Lynch walked with us, but even moreso in nightmares. In the last weeks I rewatched two of his most lasting dreams-turned-nightmares (or nightmares-turned-dreams-turned-nightmares-again), Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, with interesting results. I hadn't seen Lost Highway in about 25 years, so I barely remembered anything besides freaky as shit Robert Blake, the fact that Bill Pullman transmorphs into Balthazar Getty and, for some reason, the tailgating scene, where gangster Mr. Eddie beats an asshole driver into a pulp because the one thing he can't abide is tailgating. But I had completely forgotten about the video tapes that start the, uh, mystery plot, for example, and realize that maybe Michael Haneke nicked these for Caché. So, while there was a ton of cool stuff to rediscover, the movie still makes not a lick of sense in any traditional way. But man, if Lynch can't keep your attention with the moving lurking camera in the first twenty minutes, or with a piece of pure cinema, set to This Mortal Coil's amazing version of "Song To The Siren". I can't embed a Youtube video here since it's NSFW stuff, but it's this scene. 

The rewatch of Mulholland Drive was a bit of a letdown, though. I, like many, had it tagged as Lynch's masterpiece, as when I first saw it, it blew me away, and kept its spell even on a second viewing. I don't know, maybe I wasn't in the mood, but the magic didn't work this time. Don't get me wrong, the movie is still an amazing salvage job by Lynch, to turn what was an open-ended mystery full of non sequiturs into something making sense and holding up pretty well. But it can not hide the fact, that it is a shaggy dog story. And while that makes a wholelot of sense considering Mulholland Drive's production history, I realized that after the relatively stringent and cohesive (by Lynch standards) Blue Velvet, every Lynch film apart from The Straight Story is a shaggy dog story. That's just how Lynch functions, he has no use or need for conventional plotting. Which of course makes him the 'take it or leave it'-proposition he is for most folks. 

In Dreams I Walk With You - A Musical Journey Through Lynch Land covers every Lynch movie besides The Elephant Man and Dune, both of which aren't real Lynchian Lynch movies and whose scores I felt didn't mingle well with the rest, despite quite liking Toto's work on Dune. And of course I included a bunch of stuff from both Twin Peaks series. Despite being a mild dispappointment on rewatch, Mulholland Drive is the most represented Lynch project here with a whooping six selections, followed by the original Twin Peaks series with four, not counting spoken word segments. Yes, friends, I smuggled two recordings from Dale Cooper to Diane into the mix. 

Angelo Badalamenti, Lynch's musical mstermind and partner in crime, is of course all over this collection, as the first thing that comes to mind for me when I think of Lynch's projects are Badalamenti's inimitable and lush synth scores. Hell, I even indulge Lynch's weird and thankfully shortlived romance with industrial rock/heavy metal in the mid-90s that was all over the soundtrack of Lost Highway. As the representative of that kind of music I have a snatch of Rammstein's "Rammstein", but only a snatch. Rammstein feels like the kind of band that's better to listen to as instrumentals, and I quite like the creeping menace of the song's intro, because as soon as Till Lindemann's teutonic rolling R's come around I usually switch the channel. Like a lot of score cues, "Rammstein" has been edited, this one more brutally than others, though, for only a taste of Lynch's weird indutrial periods. Most other edits are score cues running a little long for my tastes concerning the flow of the selection, thogh I did edit two tracks from Lost Highway together as a little medley, Badalamenti's "Fred's World" and Bowie's "I'm Deranged". And I did a ton of work on transitions, fade outs, etc. to have a continuous and nicely flowing musical landscape.

In Dreams I Walk With You - A Musical Journey Through Lynch Land inhabits that sweet spot (I think) between Lynch's obsession with 50's and early 60's music (which no one could make sound as sinister as he did) and the lush scoring of Badalamenti, with a dash of Lynch's penchant for sultry female vocalists and retro rockabilly-era crooners. If I did my job right, and I think I did, this should take you away into Lynch Land for about an hour and twenty minutes. 

In dreams and nightmares, Lynch walked with us. Walk with him for a while...

 

Fleetwood Mac's almost forgotten masterpiece...fully (master) pieced together

That's right, I'm not quite done with the middle-period Mac (and not with David Lynch either, but that's another matter...stay tuned), so here what is easily the best album of those uncertain middle years I recently covered. And yet, and yet, Bare Trees could have been better, pushing the album from really good into greatness territory. But egos and band politics prevented that from happening, years before the Lindsey & Stevie soap opera started. Those things were always in play in the Mac, fitting for a band who had already lost two guitar players, including the founder of the band, under odd circumstances and were just about to lose a third one (and soon afterwards a fourth, and then a fifth). If you think about it, being a guitar player in Fleetwod Mac is like being a drummer in Spinal Tap. With less early and odd deaths, thankfully, but still, the band's penchant from 1969 onwards for losing their guitar players in rapid and often utterly weird fashion was quite the sight: drug-related burn out, being recruited to a religious sect while going out to buy a magazine, fired for being a drunken asshole one too many times, fired for cuckolding the drummer, quit due to the proverbial musical differences. If you look at the list only two of these would seem like normal circumstances, and that's already relative due to being in a rock'n'roll context. I guess It's fine then that the band proudly upheld their tradition, when Lindsey Buckingham got fired in 2018 for smirking. But I digress.

Back to Bare Trees, masterpiece of middle period Mac, yet sabotaged for no good reason. hat am I talking about? "Trinity", that is what I'm talking about. If you downloaded A Period Of Transition then you've already heard this outtake from Bare Trees: Great, memorable melody, awesome guitar riffs, typically emotive vocal from Danny Kirwan. So, with all the qualites that the track has, why wasn't it on the album? It's pure conjuncture, and no one will probably readily admit to it, but I think petty politics got in the way of making the album better. Unlike the Rumours scenario and the controversial - at least to Stevie Nicks - decision to leave off "Silver Springs", this wasn't a question of time constraints and exceeding vinyl length. As a matter of fact, Bare Trees' original LP release showed a weird imbalance, with side b being more than five minutes longer than side a. Guess which great four-minute-and-change track could have thus found a place on the a-side? 

Danny Kirwan was firing on all cylinders going into the Bare Trees sessions, and the record stands as the best testament to his talents. I've already talked about the brillance of "Dust" in my Period Of Transition write-up, but that's not to discount the beauty of "Child Of Mine", the beautiful reverie of "Sunny Side Of Heaven", the driving title track or "Danny's Chant" which starts with a honest to goodness heavy metal riff before settling into a more relaxed groove and Kirwan's wordless vocalizing.  

What's more, the other two composing members of Fleetwood Mac more than held up their part of the bargain. Bob Welch contributes what I personally think is his best Mac song, "The Ghost" and "Sentimental Lady", which is less maudlin then the full sort rock remake he cut as a solo single a ouple of years later. Cristine McVie also brought two sprightly, lovely songs to the sessions, so that even when the number of their contributions was dwarfed by Kirwan's, the quality wasn't. 

Add to all these "Trinity" and you've got a small masterpiece by itself. And yet, for the band, something didn't add up, notably Kirwan's writing credits. Having already half of the album's songs to himself, the inclusion of Trinity would have given him six and essentially made the album look like a Kirwan solo venture with occasional cameos from Chistine McVie and Bob Welsh. I think this is the single reason why the song was kept off the album. What makes this especially hard to accept is that while a great song lay dormant in the vaults for twenty years, Mick Fleetwood had no problem 'redressing the balance' by including what is essentially a stoner's humour one-note joke, disguising his voice to impersonate an old lady reciting poetry, instead of having the real Mrs. Scarott reading her poem which probably would have only been marginally better. Either way, thanks, Mick, but no thanks. So, this version of Bare Trees obviously gets rid of Mick's 'Mrs. Scarott' crap that never should have made the album and reinstates "Trinity" to its rightful place. 

Bare Trees was the end for Danny Kirwan in Fleetwood Mac, as he was, as mentioned above, being fired for being a drunk and belligerent asshole one too many times, and unfortunately it was also the end for him as a composer of great songs. For whatever reasons - his encroacing alcoholism, the lack of competition, real and imagined, from within the Mac - his solo albums never came close to aspiring to the quality of compositions he did for Fleetwood Mac, often choosing much simpler strutures and banal lyrics. So let this reconfigured version of Bare Trees then stand as the testimonial to Danny Kirwan's underappreciated genius, more than ably assisted by the rest of the band. The trees on the cover might be bare, but the Mac's treasure trove of good songs was overflowing here.

Get on your keyboards and ride...uh...write!

If a link is broken, just say so in a comment. Anonymous if necessary! Why would two dozen of you wander in a thread, see that the music isn't there any more, slump your shoulders and wander off elsewhere disappointed? 

JUST ASK FOR A DAMN LINK!

Or, you know, go without the music, but the first option seems better.

Links for Neil Young's Harvest Time, The Beach Boys' All This Is That, 60.000 Buffalo's Nevada Jukebox and Prince's Miles From The Park (feat. Miles Davis) have been renewed. You need anything else, just let uncle OBG know...

...but let him know...

The Dangerous Duo Of Bluegrass or The Ballad Of Doug And Geno

Some really old school One Buck Heads might remember my long write-up for my alt version of Mannassas' second album, which also doubled as a reflection on how many early counytry rock/Americana acts followed up a classic debut album with a disappointing follow-up. And for no act is this probably more true than Dillard & Clark, whose short but sweet debut The Fantastic Expedition Of Dillard And Clark was an instant classic, then followed up one year later with Through The Morning, Through The Night, which has three Clark classics ("Kanssa City Southern", "Polly", "Through The Morning, Through The Night"), but is otherwise a misshapen dog's breakfast of an album also including what is probably the worst original song Gene Clark ever wrote ("Corner Street Bar") with an awful vaudeville vocal from Clark, a dreadful version of "Rocky Top" sung by Donna Washburn who is decidely neither Dillard nor Clark, a weak lead vocal exercise from Doug and a ton of cover songs instead of the band profiting from having one of the best songwriters of their time among its midst. 

And yet it had started out so promisingly, at least musically. Gene had signed with A&M Records while fronting The Gene Clark-Laramy Smith Group, but that group had only yielded a couple of demos and then petered out. Dillard, having the infamous 'creative differences' with brother Rodney had quit The Dillards, and with nothing else going on, the two hooked up to form Dillard & Clark. The connection between the two was instantanous, musically and unfortunately also in how they spent their leasure time. Both were into fast motorbikes - sporting some slightly Village People-ish leather motorbike gear on some of the pictures for The Fantastic Expedition Of Dillard And Clark. The other hobby they had in common: heavy drinking, unfortunately. 

When the dangerous duo of bluegrass played, it was heaven. When they got to drinking, it could be hell. None more so then their disastrous debut concert at the famed Troubadour, when Dillard & Clark had topped off an afternoon of drining Martinis with a side dish of Acid. The concert started with Gene sitting on an amp facing the wall instead of the audience and, after two songs, a shit-faced Dillard voluntarily jumping on his fiddle and breaking it into bits, prompting mandolin player Don Beck to walk off stage, never to return! Clark spent most of the concert with his back to the audience, and then the band called off the rest of the gig halfway through.  

Drug-related activities aside, musically, for one album at least, it was a match made in heaven. The instant cameraderie of Dillard, Clark and running mate Bernie Leadon is obvious in these recordings. If The Fantastic Expedition had a flaw, it was that at a mere nine tracks and a running time of 29 minutes it was a decidedly skimpy proposition. 

The infamous Troubadour concert...everything looks a-okay here, right?!

The quality loss in between albums is best explained by the fundamental change in band dynamics. The arrival of Donna Washburn, the band's own Yoko Ono, brought a third harmony vocal to the band that could be magnificent, as on "Why Not Your Baby", but it also pushed Leadon out of the band. Not only a loss in terms of his guitar playing, but as a creative contributor : Leadon co-wrote six of the first album's eight original songs. With Donna pushing for more attention for her Dougie, Clark now had to compete for lead vocals, but what really changed the dynamics was that Dillard also realized that with master fiddler Byron Berline now on board, The Expedition could be a fast-paced electric bluegrass band  - a discipline for which Clark, the master of moody melancholia and slow to midtempo rhythms - had little use or natural affection for. So Clark as a songwriter was starting to get sidelined by his own band, with his natural style of songwriting not fitting with the 2.0 version of the band. 

Thus, a stunning seven out of eleven tracks on Through The Morning, Through The Night were covers, with Gene relegated to a mere four songs, including the awful "Corner Street Bar". Most of the covers faild to impress, though their reading of The Beatles' "Don't Let Me Down" was a certified highlight, notably the only non-bluegrass cover on the album. To make things worse, A&M still went by the old 'singles are singles and albums are albums' credo, when "Lyin' Down The Middle" and "Why Not Your Baby" could have boosted the album after a failed run as as singles releases and most certainly upgraded the quality of Through The Morning, Through The Night by replacing, say, "Rocky Top" and "Corner Street Bar".  

The Dillard &Clark Experience 2.0 - why is Gene with The Beverly Hillbillies? 

Seeing how his role in the band had been reduced and the cameraderie changed, Clark left the band in late 1969. Dillard tried to keep the band going as The Doug Dillard Experience, though the band only ever released a single song, "Runaway Country" from the 1971 soundtrack to car-racing cult classic in waiting Vanishing Point. While running the Experience, Dillard also decided to cut a solo album in the winter of 1969, with The Banjo Album being released in 1970. Dillard brought in Clark to guest on harmonica on his own composition "With Care From Someone". Later in 1971 The Doug Dillard Experience cut a demo tape, mostly of bluegrass standards in hopes of finding a record deal, but when that failed to materialize, Dillard finally called it quits on the band. He released another solo album in 1974, then rejoined The Dillards. 

Woof, quite a bit of history to get through before reaching at our One Buck Record of the day which I proudly call The Complete Expedition Of Dillard & Clark. Because it pretty much is. This set features every track Dillard & Clark ever issued on albums or singles, plus the bonus tracks that came out on re-issues of the band, plus the one released song by The Doug Dillard Experience. But that's not all folks! It also includes almost all of Dillard's The Banjo Album - which, seeing how it was cut simultaneously to Dillard's time in the band seems a fitting inclusion - and finally most of the demos the The Doug Dillard Experience cut in 1971. That's a whooping 46 tracks for the dedicated bluegrass and country rock lover! 

Dangerous Liaisons!

But since not everyone might be that dedicated, that's where my sequencing of the collection comes in. If you just want the highlights of Dillard & Clark, and notably Gene Clark's best work, then Disc 1 is for you, as it's programmed as a sort of 'Best Of' for Dillard & Clark, collecting all the best moments from their two albums and two non-album singles, plus the Doug Dillard Experience song and two Dillard instrumentals. Just rename the folder and the half Complete Edition becomes a full Best Of! It's genius! 

Disc 2 is then for the serious Bluegrass or Dillard & Clark lover, collecting the weaker moments from Dillard & Clark, including two outtakes from Through The Morning, Through The Night, the fun but slight b-side Elvis cover "Don't Be Cruel", the lead vocal contributions of Donna & Dougie, as well as the 1971 Experience demos and the rest of Dillard's solo Banjo Album tracks. So, Disc 1 is for beginners, Disc 2 is for advanced students of the matter and if you want the whole shebang - well, good on you! And as a free bonus for nuts like me who burn things to disc, you even get CD artwork! 

Oh boy, this sure is getting long, so I'll leave you with some of the finest country and bluegrass picking the burgeoning L.A. country rock scene had to offer in 68 and 69. Get a hold of The Complete Expedition of Dillard & Clark...

                                                                                                                                  

Let's get some Clarity here - do you wanna try these guys or not...?

Oh, c'mon you guys! Is it because I said the e-word? It's because I said the e-word, right?! The guys in Jimmy Eat World would be the first to protest the label, like any self-respecting punk band that got put into the 'emo' box. They would also protest that my compilation of Jimmy Eat World's early days sits as the least viewed (and, thus, downloaded) album on the entire site. Give these guys a chance! They're good! Really! Certified four-star classic!

I'll give this one more shot, and if Jimmy Eat World still can't start some world-(b)eating, we'll see about the rest of the content I had planned for them. But yeah, Clarity it is. When Jimmy Eat World recorded that album in the late 90s, they were aware that this was probably their last shot at the big time. Predecessor Static Prevails had underperformed, and if the next album would do the same, they were probably done with a major label. So the band put everything into this record, looking for new sounds and new expressions - and actually found them! Clarity is a quantum leap from the unfocused and relatively monotonous Static Prevails. Lead vocals - save one cameo - are now safely in the hands of Jim Adkins, whose warmer and higher voice is much more suited to the increase in - yes - emotions that these compositions carry. And there's an assurance and maturity in these performances that just isn't there in their early work.

Their musical choices are better than their choices of sweaters, I swear...

Clarity was their big breakthrough with the critics, if not quite yet the public. They were right about this being their last shot with Capitol for whom this album didn't make enough money. But they had put enough of the advance on the side for the follow-up which really broke them through! But that is a story for another day, god willing and the creek don't rise (...and the views on One Buck Records also rising...). But there was an issue with the album that didn't make me love it as much as I thought I should and wanted to, considering how much I like certain songs. And then I realized that it was the sequencing that always bugged me. 

According to Adkins, it was "the most punk rock thing to do" to open with the slow, moody, Low-inspired "Table For Glasses", but I thought the album never got off the right foot with that. Call me a relic, call me what you will, but an album should open with a kick-ass number. So I put the obvious single "Lucky Denver Mint" up front and then programmed it so there would be no lulls or dull moments throughout the album, resequencing it from the ground up. Only obvious album closer "Goodbye Sky Harbor" is in the same spot as the original version. When starting to compile my own version of Clarity I thought I would dump some tracks but I found that track for track there were no obvious losers in the bunch, only winners due to a way better sequencing (he very humbly adds). 

I did a minor editing, getting rid of some electronic bleeps (moody, but kind of annoying) at the beginning and end of "12.23.95" and also cut down the 16 minutes of "Goodbye Sky Harbor" by about three minutes, when the song turned into a weird drone-y thing. I liked the hypnotizing raga-like rhythm of the twelve minute minute instrumental coda, but that was a bit much there at the end. And when finalizing the album I reliazed I had to work on the links betwen tracks, so finally I did quite a bit more detail work then I wanted, but the result is worth it. 

So, yeah, give this a try, folks, you won't regret it. It really is quite a good rock'n'roll record, and you and I will refrain from using the evil e-word ever again. Kick ass rock, beautiful ballads, what more can one ask for? Don't answer that, it's purely rhetorical! So, get some Clarity and give me some clarity... 

Warren Zevon's Manifest Destiny

How crazy is it to mess with one of the best albums of all time and hope to get away with something worthwhile? Probably plenty crazy, but the One Buck Guy fears no challenge. It helps that this classic album is still somewhat underappreciated and overlooked, a lot like the man who created it. Warren Zevon may be the man to those who know him, but unfortunately a big part of the general population either doesn't know him or - if they're of a certain age - only know him as a sort-of goofy one-hit wonder with "Werewolves Of London". Zevon was so much more, and his second album Warren Zevon told you as much. Not a real debut album, that was the ill-conceived, low-budget Wanted Dead Or Alive by Zevon (no Warren yet) produced by gadfly Kim Fowley for Imperial in 1969 - but a real and utterly compelling introduction to the poet laureate of L.A. Noir rock'n'roll.

It's also pretty crazy that this blog has been kicking about for almost a year and a half and I haven't gotten around to posting anything by or about Warren Zevon, one of my favorite artists. On the other hand, most of his albums are what they are, which mostly means great to very good, but also without a lot of material to do alternate albums and the like. More importantly, most Zevon albums feel like they don't need an alternate album. Warren Zevon certainly doesn't, and yet here is one. Most alt albums that I propose on this blog are real alternatives that - at least to me - improve on the released version in one way or the other. But there's room for another sort of alt album, a companion piece that shows the road(s) not taken. Manifest Destiny squarely falls into that concept. No alt album could supplant Warren Zevon, but an alt album can support it and bring some of its underlying ideas closer to the surface. 

The concept of Manifest Destiny isn't entirely mine. About twenty years or so ago I was hanging out at the Warren Zevon Bulletin Board and one of the members there posted the observation that Warren Zevon was both a tresk westwards and from past to present, starting in mid 19th Century Missouri and ending up in 1970's L.A. From this observation sprang the idea of Manifest Destiny, though I had to tweak the track list a bit to make it work in the way I wanted it to. First off, I wanted two specific tracks on the album that weren't on Warren Zevon. One is "Vera Cruz" which could have been had producer Jackson Browne chosen differently. He picked the line-up from the songs Zevon had amassed over the years, deciding to hold back "Werewolves Of London" and "Vera Cruz" for the follow-up. But not only does the song feel like it should be with the ones on Warren Zevon, it also fits into the concept, even though the geographical route now leads through the south rather than Chicago. 

The second song is one that Zevon probably wrote for a follow-up to Wanted Dead Or Alive on Imperial Records that never materialized. "Studebaker", with its Southern California setting and travel motif seemed to fit right into the concept of Manifest Destiny  - all the losers and schemers and lowlifes in L.A. have to come from somewhere, right? There was one issue though: The song was never entirely completed, basically just stopping - so I had to get creative to produce an ending for the song. I did, together with a new opening that fits the narrative and hopefully comes off as hoped.  

The rest of the songs come from Warren Zevon, though in order to fit my idea of the album, two tracks were dropped. I couldn't find a logical way to integrate "I Sleep When I'm Dead" and then dropped "Hasten Down The Wind" at the last second. "Hasten Down The Wind" is a fantastic song, but it just didn't fit well into the road and traveling motif I imagined for side one of Manifest Destiny and also had that (imagined vinyl) side run too long, so with a heavy heart I deleted it from the line-up. 

At first I had a pretty healthy mix of versions from the finished album and the alternative takes and outtakes on its disc of bonus track from the 2008 Collector's Edition. But finally, bit by bit, I replaced the glossier originals by their alternatives, save for the majestic closing track "Desperadoes Under The Eaves" - in my opinion Warren's best song, bar none - which just sounded wrong in its embryionic early version - and "Mama Couldn't Be Persuaded" for which no alternative version has been issued. It just felt right that the road trip concept of at least the first part of Manifest Destiny would push for an earthier instrumentation - see David Lindley's banjo & fiddle that are almost entirely buried in the original version of "Frank And Jesse James", but come to the fore here or the added emphasis on Wddy Wachtel's guitar work that the lack of overdubs reveal. Lindley's fiddle, also much more prominent on the alt version of "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" becomes a real presence on the album while being almost inaudible on Warren Zevon. 

I got into a bit of a pickle when coming upon "Mohammed's Radio"as I didn't want to go with the extremely produced original, including the lush overdubbed backing vocals of Mr. Buckingham and Mrs. Nicks and Bobby Keys' sax that I could go without. I also didn't want to use the alternative version, which in return really clarifies how much of a Bob Dylan rip off/homage the song with its elaborate metaphors is, as Warren tries at one point - rather unsuccessfully, one might add - a Dylanesque vocal delivery. So I 'cheated' and included the version Zevon did for The Old Grey Whistle Test BBC TV show with Jackson Browne. It is one of Zevon's best ever vocal and has just the right amount of instrumentation, including of course a contribution by David Lindley. 

The alternative, more bare-bones versions of "The French Inhaler" and "Carmelita" bring out a more vulnerable aspect to their respective tales of hustling, pimping, drug-taking and despair, with Warren's voice essentially naked. "Join Me In L.A." always had an undercurrent of barely concealed menace, but the alternative version (a.k.a. take 2) with its sinewy, snakey guitar lines brings the menace right to the surface, making the song sound sinister at times, especially in the instrumental interludes, with Warren's protagonist making spoken word offers you should probably refuse, like going off to Griffith Park to take a couple of Octamols. The journey of Manifest Destiny changes, musically and lyrically. The protagonists of the first part, 'The Road' (which would be vinyl side a) are sometimes in trouble or downtrodden, but the promise of something better down the road is still there, and the music still sounds upbeat and determined. But when they have reached 'The Last Frontier' (vinyl side b), a.k.a. the city of angels, things take a turn for the worse, and the music itself becomes moodier and less upbeat. Then again, you'll be hard-pressed to find L.A. rock as noir and despairing as "The French Inhaler", "Carmelita" and "Desperadoes Under The Eaves". 

I still could go on for hours about what makes these songs great, but this is already one of the longest write-ups as is, so I'll just leave you to get to Manifest Destiny to either rediscover these songs in a new context and new versions, or to discover them for the first time. Either way, you're in for a treat. 

So Long David, Hopefully Now You Can Reach Transcendance...

Ah, what the hell. My wife just walked in the room and casually said, "Hey, you've seen that David Lynch is dead, right?!". Uh. No. Nope. Haven't seen that. Damn. It's been a while we've heard from or seen something from Lynch since his return to Twin Peaks, but in the new changed media and cinema landscape that didn't seem overly surprising. His death? Surprising, though, at least for me. I hadn't heard anything about him being sick or what have you. Just read up about him living with emphysema for the last couple of years due to starting smoking at age 8 (!) and his evacuation due to the wildfire in and around Los Angeles seemingly doing him in. Damn. 

I also just realized he didn't do anything for a decade between Inland Empire and Twin Peaks: The Return. Double Damn. Then again, I hated Inland Empire with a passion back in the day and had sort of crossed Lynch off my priority list. Still, not knowing that makes me grumpy. Because while I'm not the biggest Lynch fan on the planet, there are a bunch of films from him that I like or love. Mulholland Drive is fantastic. Blue Velvet is a deranged classic. Hell, I even like his version of Dune and Lost Highway, despite the latter being utterly baffling, no matter how you slice it. I can't really get on board with Wild At Heart and - I might have mentioned it - I hate hate hate Inland Empire, that long ugly-as-hell insane torture device of a film. But yeah, if you were a budding cineaste like I was in the mid 90s there's no way that your education didn't include some David Lynch. 

So. I obviously had planned something different to go up on the site tomorrow, but January continues to surprise me - and by proxy you - with more unforeseen stuff. So, something Lynch-related it is. I had foreseen to post my version of the The Music Of David Lynch album at some point, so obviously 'some point' has just turned into tonight. The Music Of David Lynch was a live concert memento of a charity event benefitting the David Lynch Foundation that was issued in 2016. But my version is, as usual, quite different from the original configuration. I completely reconfigured the sequencing and I threw off the track by Moby (which for me just didn't fit in with the mood of the rest of the record). Duran Duran's "The Chauffeur" already was close to the cut line, but I kept that track for something a little more muscular in the middle of the mostly moody stuff. I threw out David Lynch's "Poem Of Unknown Origin", an exercise in child-like simplicity. Sorry, David. And I obviously got rid of speeches calling for contributions, since unless you were there, that's something you probably need to listen to exactly zero times. 

So, what about the music of The Music Of David Lynch? Rebekah Del Rio reprises her classic "Llorando" segment from Mulholland Drive. Tennis And Twin Peaks channel their inner Roy Orbison/Dean Stockwell with "In Dreams", recalling the most memorable sequence of Blue Velvet. Lykke Li gives a moody reading of Chris Isaak's moody breakthrough "Wicked Game". Jim James uses his finest falsetto to interpret "Sycamore Trees" from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, doing his best Jimmy Scott interpretation. And of course we couldn't go without Angelo Badalamenti, the musical mastermind behind almost all of Lynch's musical adventures, including his own records or the ones he worked on with Twin Peaks revelation Julee Cruise. Badalamenti opens proceedings with the mighty "Twin Peaks Theme", sweetens the middle with "Laura Palmer's Theme" and then lets the evening end with dwarves dancing into the night ("Dance Of The Dream Man"). Just like David Lynch would have probably wanted. 

R.I.P. David Lynch (1946-2025)

 

Meanwhile, somewhere on the West Coast...

While Fleetwood Mac were busy transitioning from one type of band to another to another to another, across the big pond and  continent inbetween two young aspiring musicians were trying to make ends meet. Stephanie, dite Stevie, Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, were trying to make a living on music, something that had hit something of a snag. After leaving Bay area bar band Fritz who for years had try to break through but never did, Nicks and Buckingham in the early 70s were not quite ready to take over the music world. Nicks famously worked as a cocktail waitress and a cleaning woman, while Buckingham infamously stayed at home honing his guitar-playing skills. And also, uh, getting stoned on eleven pounds of opiated hash with other music friends/hanger ons/stoners, including a pre-fame Warren Zevon. Like Warren, he went out on the road with Don Everly, albeit on a short club tour. Like Nicks, he finally had to join the working population before Fleetwood Mac came calling, working in a PR Agency. 

But in between these periods of odd jobs and busy-doing-nothing, there was Buckingham Nicks. Nicks had met enginer Keith Olsen in 1971 while cleaning his house, and with him the band cut their album for Polydor. Assisting Olsen was Richard Dashut, one of the architects of the California Mac sound later in the decade. Drums were manned by Elvis' backing band member Ronnie Tutt and pro's pro Jim Keltner, future Warren Zevon collaborators Jorge Calderon (percussion) and studio pro Waddy Wachtel (guitar) filled out the sound. Buckingham Nicks is a lush-sounding album that presages a lot of the million-sellers Fleetwood Mac would produce just a couple years later. But in 1973, with the record being more or less completely ignored by the Polydor PR team, no one would buy an album featuring virtual unknowns Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, despite the added attraction of Stevie being topless on the cover. So Polydor quickly deleted Buckingham Nicks from their catalogue. 

You would think considering the success of Fleetwood Mac and Nicks solo that Buckingham Nicks never got officially rereleased. Weird from Polydor that as soon as Fleetwood Mac or at least Rumours became hits they wouldn't run out to release this. And then for years Lindsey talked about the possibility of officially releasing it, giving it its first digital release, but alas...and considering the terms on which Buckingham and Nicks left things between them a couple of years ago, I think there is little hope that we will ever get an official release from this. The version I have is, I believe, a high-quality vinyl rip. 

This is a carefully curated version of Buckingham Nicks. You can get a bunch more of periphelia from places like Paul's Albums That Should Exist blog, but not every outtake is worth hearing, or hearing more than once. So for this edition I kept only the best and best-sounding outtakes/demos, on par with the album itself. Basically you won't hear a difference when the album segues from closing track "Frozen Love" into first outtake "Garbo". On top of the five top outtakes you'll also get five live tracks from a concert in Tuscaloosa, one of the last to feature Buckingham Nicks under that banner after they had already joined the Mac and wrapped up contractual obligations. They run through early versions of "Monday Morning", "I Don't Wanna Know" and "Blue Letter", plus another unreleased Buckingham original, "Heartbreaker" and the only mini-classic to come out of this album, the propulsive "Don't Let Me Down Again". For an album which sold, like, a couple of hundred copies, it must have at least ended up in the hands of some musicians, yielding cover versions of that song from Richard Torrance and Eureka (coming up on an All Pearls, No Swine comp in a couple of weeks) and Rusty Wier (probably also coming up in some form on this blog in the near future).  

Oh well, if you have some love for the Cal Mac and the Buckingham Nicks duo, you owe it to yourself to check this out. Liddy Buck has two instrumental fingerpicking showpieces, and generally speaking these songs are about as well constructed as most of their Mac stuff. Buckingham Nicks deserves better than being a half-forgotten juvenilia curiosity, with this version of the album hopefully doing its humble part to remedy that situation.

Fleetwood Mac's Period of Transition..And Its Guardian Angel

Two things recently pushed me towards a return to the Mac these days. One was, after moving a couple of months ago, the first CDs I could get my hands on working in one of the rooms was this home-made box set of Fleetwood Mac I had made a couple of years ago. It was a great rush sitting through a disc running through the California Mac glory years. Say what you will about the Lindsey Buckingham-led band what you will, but they sure knew how to write and arrange tunes. Hearing the contributions of Buckingham to the standard Christine McVie ballad alone convinced me that Liddy Buck is staying underrated as hell. But another disc caught even more of my attention. It is the basis of the One Buck Record of the day. Subtitled 'A Period Of Transition', it covers the troubled middle years in between the distinct Peter Green-led blues phase of the Mac and the mainstream pop phase following the recruitment of Nicks & Buckingham. I had forgotten how much I liked that compilation of tunes from Kiln House through Heroes Are Hard To Find. The other thing that really pushed me to give this another look was a chat with an old friend from college around Christmas who had just gotten introduced recently to these often 'lost' years via a studio compilation. So I polished off A Period of Transition and that's what you get here. Polishing off in this case means tweaking the sequencing and making one or two additions or substitutions to the line-up. For some songs I used the single versions to better keep the momentum going. 

Selection of tracks is strictly personal. It does include some of their best known songs from the period, including Bob Welsh's first take on "Sentimental Lady". But really, what A Period Of Transition is mostly about is the genius of Danny Kirwan. Kirwan was the Mac's guardian and guiding angel through these troubled times, even if Bob Welch held out longer. But the creative genius and the greatest moments of this period of transition were almost all Kirwan's. So Danny the boy wonder gets most of the juiciest moments here, as he should. Nine tracks here, almost half, are Kirwan's, including what might be Fleetwood Mac's most beautiful song, "Dust", killer outtake "Trinity", the spellbinding "Woman Of A 1.000 Years" and "Sands Of Time" and hard rocker "Jewel-Eyed Judy", which opens proceedings. Seriously, listen to "Dust", all two and a half minutes of it. Has there ever been a more beautiful tremolo guitar? Kirwan stole the words from First World War poet Rupert Brooke (and yes, he outright stole them, no "adapted from..." stuff), but the way he sings them, ably assisted by McVie on ghostly backing vocals..goosebumps, man. 

A Period Of Transition of course also shows the immense variety of those middle years. There is only one remnant of the tail end of the Jeremy Spencer era, "I Am The Rock" is one of his better Rock'n'Roll/Buddy Holly parodies/homages/thefts. Spencer's rock'n'roll pastiches had outlived their usefulness once Green left and most of the standard blues with him, not to mention that now with Kirwan they actually had someone who could write uptempo songs. But yeah, let's have one reminder of Spencer's particular brand of Fleetwood Mac on there. The compilation also makes place for one Dave Walker, shortlived show man the band hired to have a traditional front man, before deciding that finally that's not what they wanted. He's remembered only for contributing a lackluster version of "(I'm A) Roadrunner to Penguin, but the real highlight of his short tenure was his other song, "The Derelict", which sees the Mac dipping a toe into country rock, and doing it surprisingly well. 

Christine McVie is represented with some of her best and sprightliest moments, including the horn-driven "Heroes Are Hard To Find", "Remember Me" and "Dissatisfied". I mostly stuck with uptempo songs for McVie because I always considered that her sweet spot in the Mac, when her pure ballads could sometimes wander into sticky, even yawnworthy territory. "Did You Ever Love Me" widens the palette of the middle Mac even more with its calypso elements. The Mac tried a bit of everything during these years, and did almost all of it pretty well. 

I was ready to say that Bob Welch got the short end of the stick here, since I'm not a huge fan of Bob's jazz fusion noodlings, even going so far as to call him Boring Bob behind his back, but I find that with three lead vocals and an (almost) instrumental to his name he isn't as underrepresented as I would have thought when I started compiling. "The Ghost" off the secret classic Bare Trees was a late addition to the line-up, possibly my favorite Welsh Mac track. 

So, 21 tracks and 75 minutes of the finest the Mac had to offer between 1970 and 1974. If you're familiar with this, have a nice stroll down memory lane. If you're not, hidden treasures await you. Even during some of their most troubled times - too long to recount here, but there's always Wikipedia - they often were able to produce wonderful music and A Period Of Transition goes a long way to proving that. 

Fly Away With Them Byrds, Johnny And Mary Come Lately's...

 

Alright, some folks are checking out some of the alt Byrds albums that I've done..but instead of going into the original posts...and then maybe in a couple of days some others...here's the deal I'm proposing. Call it the box set deal. In this here post you get a chance to snap up the entire Byrds Alt Album Series of the One Buck Guy plus the companion album Twilight. That's six alt albums, covering the period from Sweetheart Of The Radio onwards to the end of The Byrds with the self-titled Asylum album in 1973. One Hundred Years From Now, the Sweetheart Alt, now has the correct, Farq-ised artwork. And of course, as virtual liner notes, you have lots of reading material in the original posts to go along with listening to the albums.

So, what a deal, right?! (Especially for Newbies around here). Get the entire alt Byrds library in one fell swoop. And make OBG's download link-renewing life easier, also in one fell swoop. Everybody wins! So, grab those Byrds and fly away...

PS: So those last days I have been busy updating download links for old posts, but new music isn't far behind, promised! Be back tomorrow for music involving a British band named after their rhythm section...

Public Service Announcement: Nothing Is Eternal...And Certainly Not Workupload Links...

Which is why I need your help in pointing out dead links. If it isn't a 'best seller' on here like the three albums on the bottom of the front page and is older than a month or a month and a half, it's pretty likely that the link has gone dead. I am happy that some new faces have found this blog and I can see some of you rummaging around my back pages, which is great, but you won't get the music with the words if you don't leave me a little word that you'd like a link re-established. 

So, just from browsing what people had a look at, I've put new links for The Curtis Brothers, The Hooters, Bruce Stephens, Generation X, Beachwoods Sparks and Volume 18 of All Pearls, No Swine that for some reason a bunch of you landed on. So these I could see because enough of you wandered on them, and if you did, you can now wander back and get the music. But if there's just one or two clicking on a post, I probably won't see it, so just leave a word so I know what to update...

UPDATE: I also put new links to Bowie's Complete Young Americans, KT Tunstall and Nolwenn Leroy. But seriously, folks: Just ask for a link...

UPDATE 2: Hazeldine has also been updated...

The Moldau, The Message And The End Of Civilization As We Know It...

True to my name, this morning I picked up a CD for a buck, a budget-line Best Of of Al Green. It isn't much of a best of, more a case of a record company having the rights to a couple of purple period tunes of a star and desperately scrambling to put together a package that can be called a best of without totally lying. In this case, even for a slim 11-track package Universal scrambled, licensing four genuine hits from other labels and then filled up the disc with collaborations and cameo spots by Green. One such collaboration? His appearance on Arthur Baker and The Backstreet Disciples' "Love Is The Message". A song that I hadn't thought of - or heard - in more than thirty years, probably. Which got me to reminiscing... 

When I entered high school we had the wildest, weirdest bunch of teachers, the last generation of don't-give-a-fuck-about-conventions types. From a geography teacher who would give out an assignment, then hide the entire lesson behind his spread-out morning paper to the biology teacher who also was an avid bird watcher (or maybe he really was an ornithologist moonlighting as a biology teacher?) and would interrupt himself at the slightest hint of a bird call outside, rip the windows wide open to listen and then explain what bird we had possible just heard. Mr. R, our music teacher, wasn't weird like those guys. He also wasn't a music teacher by trade. He was a piano player and somewhat of a prodigy when he was young. But life's great injustices sometimes serve themselves up with vicious irony. It would suck big time for anyone to lose use of their hands due to som weird radiation accident, but for a man whose life was classical piano? Double suck, triple suck, you name it. 

I could never quite get the back story from my dad who had probably also only heard rumours, but Mr. R was also the first clear-cut handicapped person I've seen up close. His hands were forever fixed in a cramped up, fingers clutched position and the radiation had done a number on them. They were bright red and didn't look like human skin, rather like someone had attached some life-size plastic imitations to the end of his arms. He managed to manipulate a bunch of stuff with his arms and his mouth and would occasionally ask a student to help with giving out papers and the like. 'What the fuck does that have to do with Al Green?' I hear you ask. We'll get to that...

So Mr. R, as you would have guessed by now, was a big classical music guy. I seem to remember that the list ofacceptable artists in pop music began and ended with The Beatles for him. But hey, I did get introduced to classical music, including his personal favorite, Fréderic Smetana's "Vltava" ("The Moldau"), indeed a beautifully flowing piece lasting for about 13 minutes during which Mr. R would get lost in the music, slightly closing his eyes while intently listening, maybe dreaming himself back to a time when it was his fingers flying across the key, bringing Smetana or Ravel to life.

Someone had told him, he told us, that there is a song out there by someone named Arthur Baker which spends its entire running time repeating te sentence "Love is the message and the message is love". He would enunciate the words with a clear air of disgust. Such banalities! His phrasing was so portentous, you would have thought that what he described was akin to the end of civilization as we know it. He was of course totally wrong. Those words are, like, a quarter of the chorus, and there's verses and everything. Sure, the song is a tad repetitive, but nothing like the sign of doom Mr. R seemingly saw in it. Then again, he never heard it, I guess so, it's almost normal that he didn't get the message...(and the message is love!).

So, little did Mr. R know that we were just on the edge of being submerged by a wave of eurodance and techno songs which really did only consist of a line or two that were stupidly, mind-numbingly repeated over incessant beats. The end may have been nigh, but it hadn't been brought forth by Arthur Baker and his Four Horsemen Backstreet Disciples or Al Green. If he wanted to decry the state of modern pop music he was completely barking up the wrong tree. Then again, classical trained pianist -whaddayaexpect, right. 

The harbinger of doom (according to Mr. R)

So, uh, that's it. A childhood memory from a long time ago, brought up randomly by a track on a randomly picked up CD today. There is no specific point to the anecdote, its just that - an anecdote. But if you made it this far, I'lll throw in some Al Green anyway to sweeten the deal. You get that famous CD that started it all and since that isn't really the best of Al Green for reasons stated above I'll throw in his Greatest Hits (2004 edition) that really gives you Green's biggest songs. Equipped with both you really do have the basics of the Green discography. 

And remember, folks, as the Greenster said: Love is the message and the message is love, from the streets to the mountains to the heavens above. Tell everybody what you're dreaming of: That love is the message and the message is love...

PS.: Listen to "Vltava" up there, it's a really sweet piece...

 

The Slo-Mo Lonesome Sound Of Sierra

If the name Sierra Eagleson doesn't ring a bell, I won't blame you. She's not a household name, until you really know your cover artists on Youtube, and there's hundreds of them. So what's different about Mrs. Eagleson? 

Clearly, she's a really good singer, but those are a dime a dozen on the Tube. She is writng her own songs, which is not nothing, even if they aren't unmitigated masterpieces. And the production values for her songs - both self-written nnd cover versions for a virtual busking hat turning - are impeccable. But I don't know. There's just something about that voice and her phrasing, an aura of something hidden, maybe. A definite aura of sadness that permeates even the happier songs. I can't really explain it, but Mrs. Eagleson sticks out from the crowd. 

In many ways, she is a young music maker of her generation. Besides playing songs she likes on the Tube for likes and money, she is also completely aware that the music industry isn't what it was, so anything she is officially releasing is digital. And of course she isn't releasing any albums, though allegedly she's working on one now. 

Albums are for old folks, or nostalgic ones. But with the kind of numbers that an album sells these days, most young artists bypass albums in the beginning of their careers, instead opting for singles or - at the most - EPs. Larkin Poe were notorious for the number of EPs they racked up. So Sierra Eagleson has a couple of digital singles and a four-track EP to her name. Brush Fire is the One Buck Guy's attempt to see what a Sierra Eagleson album could look like, splitting its twelve tracks straight down the middle between originals and the slow, moody cover versions she made her name with on the net. The covers range from old school ("Take Me Home Country Roads") across some 80s classics ("In The Air Tonight", "Dancing In The Dark") to newer songs from the likes of Kings Of Leon ("Pyro") and Arctic Monkeys ("Do I Wanna Know?"). "Brush Fire" and "Midnight Hour", the bookends of the album, were the two main singles she has issued, together with "Darby's Song", the other three tracks are from her EP Solace. 

This is perfect music for very late evenings or very early mornings. 12 slices of moody melancholia for the season, a cocktail for when the days are still short and the nights long and dark. 

Don't Start Me To Talking...Actually, On Second Thought...

Oh my, it's been awfully quiet around here, hasn't it? 'Tis the season of quiet reflection (and overstuffed meals!), granted, and I get that the majority of you aren't big conversationalists and a bunch of you just sneak in quietly for the downloads...but...to interpolate the King...a little more conversation...

So, we're gonna try the random shuffle again. If you have a music device, crank it up to eleven put it on random or shuffle mode and see what the first ten tracks are that it proposes. Then list them underneath in the comments. There, easy. If you don't have or don't care to use a device with a shuffle function, just list the last five albums that you have listened to. If you don't listen to albums, tell me about one of your playlists. The common point in all these: Don't Start Me To Talking!

Again, visitors from near and far: You don't want Google and their bullshit cookies tracing you? I getcha! You don't need to be logged in to leave a comment, just choose 'Anonymous' and sign your post with any ol' nickname. 

random pair of boobs in desperate ploy to get visitors' attention...

So friends and neighbours, since it's up to the host to start the festivities, here's what my random shuffle looked like:

Led Zeppelin - Tangerine

Robert Palmer - I Dream Of Wires

Bobbie Gentry - Mississippi Delta

Brandon Garth - Wild Horses

Hannes Wader - Schon Morgen

Our Broken Garden - Breathe

Cowboy - Stick Together

Counting Crows - Lightning

Metallica - Don't Tread On Me

The White Stripes - You've Got Her In Your Pocket