If you are shaking a tree, but no one's there to see it, does it really move?

I never went to see Shaking Tree in concert. I never bought one of their three albums. And now I regret that I never did and never will. On one hand, Shaking Tree are, literally, like thousands of other bands: College rock from a band formed in college, get a loyal local following, bring out some records and grow their following, are on the edge of signing with a major label, and then - boom, nothing. Band is gone, their records are gone. I think about all these other bands who dreamed to go bigger than local, the elation they must have felt when that first album was out. And I'm thinking about all the music that is now lost, probably forever. Sure, some of these albums still exist, maybe in some cutout bins in whatever record stores still exist, but more likely in the garages or basements of people who liked the band back in the days and haven't thrown them in the trash, yet. But if you were a fan from when the band existed, so between 1995 and 2007, you are now middle-aged, have your I-Phone or Alexa play music and probably got rid of your CDs at least a decade ago. The title of this write-up is of course a riff on a very well known saying/philosophical riddle, but its aim is the same: What does it mean for Shaking Tree and its music if no one remembers them? 

To be fair, when I first heard of the band, I was still getting my feet under me, in a strange place, in a strange land. It was literally my first day of university classes, and the band - eager to grow their local fanbase among freshmen I imagine - had pinned a couple of maxi-CDs for promo purposes on the announcement boards in university building hallways, together with a reminder where they'd play that weekend. Not knowing any of the music clubs in town, nor having yet a reliable crew of friends to join me, I passed on that concert, though I did pocket the CD, played it once, thought 'hey, that's pretty neat' and then left things there. 

A couple of years ago, on a whim, going through my old Maxi CDs  I threw in that Shaking Tree promo disc and was blown away by how great "Memory Of Me" sounded. Shaking Tree's music with its reliance on mandolin and/or violin to fuel their songs is definitely different from the usual drums-bass-guitar four piece. Founder, lead singer and songwriter Dain Estes originally wanted the band to sound like Talking Heads circa Naked, with World Music beats and influences, but after cycling through dozens of band band members settled on a four piece with him on vocals, guitar and mandolin, plus a violin player, bassist and drummer. He found a reliable vioolonist in Dan Waddington, who stayed with Shaking Tree throughout most of its tewelve year run, whereas the staff turnover in the rhythm section was more frequent. 

Shaking Tree didn't and don't sound much like Talking Heads, but they do have a slight resemblance to the Dave Matthews Band who started to blow up at the time Shaking Tree were active. I never had much use for the Dave Matthews Band, finding most of their material bland and boring, and while the sound and feel throughout these ten Shaking Tree numbers and three Dain Estes solo tracks doesn't change much, it's more lively and memorable than its much better known counterpart, at least for my money. 

This is some fabulous music, and I'm happy I at least still have those thirteen tracks, even if that's all that remains, here, 4550 miles from where the band once roamed. And yet I have a drink and a thought for the thousands of bands whose music lies now on obsolete albums in an obsolete format in obsolete record collections. Or landfill. A drink to all those who made music when they were young, or younger, who continue to make music, for ten or ten thousands of people. Keep on making that music, and we'll keep on listening. And maybe we'll find local bands like Shaking Tree that left no footprint, but the ones in the fading memories and music collections of those that were there. Or almost there, like me. 

For those about to rock, in adulation or anonymity, we salute you. 

Gordon Lightfoot And The Last Disc Problem

And so this is it, folks, the temporary end of the road for the career-spanning Gordon Lightfoot box set I put together, now complete with Volume Three. And inevitably, as with most career retrospectives, we now run into what is known as the Last Disc Problem, something a music fan who has listened to a boxset or five will be familiar with. If a retrospective follows an artist to the end, a gradual decline sets in, some time after the halfway point and, in a multiple disc box set, noticably on the last disc. Thus, the Last Disc Problem, as the high quality of the preceding discs simply isn't there. This is also true for our last run through Gordon Lightfoot's discography, unfortunately. A Life In Song Vol. 3 - River Of Light isn't as constantly great as the first two discs, which would have been a pretty high bar to clear either way. (I know, I'm doing quite the sales job for today's One Buck Record of the day, huh?!). But there is something to be said for sticking it out to the end - both for the artist, and its audience. And I can't think of many others who stuck it out until the end like Gordon Lightfoot did. And there is still plenty of great music here

When we first hear Lightfoot at the beginning of River Of Light, during rousing opener "I'd Do It Again", his voice is still strong. Summertime Dream is in many ways Gordon's last hurrah, both in commercial terms and as a songwriter of consistently high quality output.Everything else afterwards has to be qualified in some way. This would sadly be proven true by 1978's Endless Wire, the first disappointment after a long string of good to very good albums. "Handdog Hotel Room", like "I'd Do It Again" an ode to Lightfoot's relentless touring, and "Sweet Guinevere" are the top picks from an underwhelming album, mired in surprisingly awful production by Lenny Waronker, and with the most atrocious cover art of any Lightfoot album to add insult to injury. "Endless Wire should have been called 'Endless touring makes you tired'", said James Chrispell stingingly but correctly in his review for Allmusic to explain the bored, and boring-sounding material here and concluded, also correctly, "the downward slide had begun".  

Porn mustache + porn sunglasses = good job, guys, let's take this pic for the cover...

1980's Dream Street Rose was a much better effort by both Waronker and Lightfoot. The former (with some help from fellow VIP WB producer Russ Titleman) went back to a much more synpathetic production reminiscent of his mid-70s work, while Lightfoot simply wrote a better batch of songs, including "Ghosts Of Cape Horn", "On The High Seas" and the title track. But that album was indeed the end of the road for that producer-artist tandem that ran for a decade and eight albums, nine if you count the re-recorded first half of Gord's Gold. This is truly the last old-school sounding record of Lightfoot's career. 

1982's Shadows was produced by Lightfoot and Ken Friesen, and it was the start of Lightfoot's MOR/Adult Contemporary period, where acoustic instruments and orchestrations are now replaced by synthesizers everywhere. but it is a surprisingly strong record, something Lightfoot himself considered so. He was disappointed by the album's commercial failure, calling the album "the music industry's best-kept secret". Upon relistening for this project, I was surprised how many tunes I liked from an album I had written off as adult contemporary pap. Conseuqently, Shadows gets a whooping four selections - the most of any album post-Summertime Dream - on River Of Light, including the rousing seafaring tale "Triangle (formerly featured on Shanties), the stock-taking "In My Fashion" and the moody "Heaven Help The Devil". 

Waitaminute, guys...what was the title again? Was it Shadows or Soft Focus? 

Salute one year later, howver, saw Lightfoot sucumb to the trends of the days, as it is his most 80's sounding album, and I don't mean that in a good way. A plastic drum sound, electric guitars and keyboard swashes everywhere, together with a sometimes forced-sounding optimism make for akward listening, the romantic acoustic troubadour of old now sounding like he'd want to compete with Kenny Rogers and the like.  Thus, the two most old-fashioned and folky numbers, "Whispers Of The North" and "Tattoo" have been selected for inclusion from what is ultimately a misbegotten attempt to update his sound. 

The nadir of Lightfoot's glossy AOR/adult contemporary period is 1986's East Of Midnight, which has such a slick, synthetic production that even the few memorable songs inevitably suffer from it. Album highlight "A Passing Ship" survives intact, but for the other highlight "I'll Tag Along" - which Lightfoot began to perform as a solo acoustic song after the breaks in his shows - shows up here as a solo song, though played on eletric guitar, for a TV Special in 1991. It's much better than the glossy, overproduced version from East Of Midnight. 

Not sure how that cover could possibly scream 'adult contemporary' more if it wanted to...

Sandwiched in betwen these two songs is a possibly surprising selection. Fascinatingly, the exact things that essentially killed the utterly useless modern re-recordings on Gord's Gold Vol. 2 are responsable for the one song that is a success: "The Pony Man", originally from Sit Down Young Stranger/If You Could Read My Mind, and thus easily the oldest song on the set, is like the rest filled with keyboards that replace the original acoustic framework. But here it actually works!The synth backing is atmospheric, rather than distracting, maybe because the song itself is essentially a children's dream tale, with the slightly otherwordly keyboard backing conjuring a fitttingly dream-like atmosphere and thus adding to the song, rather than subtracting, as on every other remake from the disc. 

1993's Waiting For You, Lightfoot's comeback after he had declared giving up writing and recording (though not touring) after East Of Midnight's commercial failure, was hailed as a return to form and to a more fitting acoustic sound, even though for my personal taste a lot of it is still way too glossy. The title track and "Only Love Would Know" are the top picks from the album. 

Not as gritty as the cover suggests, but a step in the right direction...

The mid-90's is unfortunately also the time when Lightfoot's voice really started to get compromised. The muddled, fussy, keyboard-heavy arrangements Lightfoot leaned on were maybe also a way to try and compensate for Lightfoot's weakening singing voice, which lost range, power and stamina. Lightfoot started to be unable to hit prolonged notes, with his singing becoming clipped and wispy. You can hear that once strong voice decaying at unfortunate speed. It's already getting quite thin on 1999's A Painter Passing Through, notably on the title track and a couple of others, so I chose the two tracks ("Ringneck Loon" and "Uncle Toad Said") that reunited good songwriting with a stronger vocal performance. 

2004's Harmony was recorded after a major health scare for Lightfoot, and was constructed by his band around Lightfoot's vocals from his demos, which some critics used to explain the less-than-great vocal performance. But it ultimately probably wouldn't have mattered. Harmony is, other than as a welcome sign of life, a relatively forgettable album.  And yet it yielded a single classic, the newly minted title song for this volume of A Life In Song, "River Of Light". If you listen past the clipped enunciation and increasingly nasal delivery that would define his final recordings, the song itself is great, easily his best in years. 

Lightfoot touring and recording well into his Eighties despite his voice now reduced to a wispy croak is nothing if not a lesson in persisting. Old Lightfoot becomes a bit the Don Quixote character he sang about, if I may paraphrase. "Singing in a whisper now, he sings in cities from shore to shore / 'till he can sing no more". So, I'm of two minds here: I don't know whether it's brave or foolhardy to go into a studio at over eighty years old, just with a guitar, and with your voice almost gone, and record a solo acoustic album. Probably a bit of both. Truthfully, most songs on Solo aren't great - as songs or performances - and when Lightfoot tries (and mostly fails) to whistle on "Dreamdrift" it's almost painful to listen to. Time and cigarettes and illness may have done a number on Lightfoot's voice, but he does not yield. There is something noble in an old warrior like Lightfoot going out on his shield like that. 

The two songs from Solo, "Return To Dust" and "Oh So Sweet" weren't necessarily planned or written as 'last songs', though they surely play that role well. For Solo, Lightfoot had discovered some demos from 2001 and 2002, tried to update and revise some of them (and failed) and finally recorded them as they were. Both are - whether planned or not - songs that illustrate the long goodbye, Lightfoot's and everybody's. Though his voice is now clearly as close to the end of the trail as Lightfoot himself, the lyrics are impressive. "Return To Dust" is a clear-eyed look back, including at his alcoholism: " They said drink and be restored / all I ever drank made me end up on the floor / and what is more a mind turned to rust that's for sure / we will return into dust through the years."

"O So Sweet" adds some more retrospection, as Lightfoot looks back bitter-sweetly on his life: "The road I chose was not all it should be / but sometimes it was oh so sweet", only to end up with some last words of wisdom for the last steps of the road: "Sometimes I remember seeing starlight fade / back when life was still only a mystery / was it good, was it bad, was it the best you ever had? / But sometimes it was oh so sweet". 

And so was your music, Gordon, so was your music. 

Thank you for the music of a lifetime. Thank you for letting me, and us, tag along. Thank you for everything, Gordon. 

Yours Truly,

the One Buck Guy

The End (Or The Oz Is Dead, Long Live The Oz)

As usual, just an hour or so after I put up a new post, news drops that another rock'n'roll legend has died. I didn't keep tabs on Ozzy Osbourne and his health, but from what I read about concerts, the Ozzster was doing them sitting down and cutting down on his concert length, because his health and stamina wouldn't allow for more. For his last ever show, Back To The Beginning (now unofficially known as The End, For Real This Time) about two weks ago, he sat on a black throne throughout, and the reunited Black Sabbath Mark 1 struggled to get through a short four song set, after a six song Ozzy solo set, and a ton of supporting acts, including Slayer, Pantera, Guns'n'Roses and Metallica. But all that doesn't matter. Ozzy got to go out the way he deserved to: on a big fuckin' stage, in front of a whole load of people. 

I can't in all honesty claim to be a huge Ozzy or Black Sabbath fan, I'm more of a 'Sabbath's first two albums and an Ozzy Greatest Hits package will do' kind of guy. Even though I always forget what a great tune "Crazy Train" is, until it comes on. But a post for and with the Oz feels appropriate, and it also gives me an excuse to get some crunchy rock'n'roll on this here blog, where in the last weeks we have been mostly acoustic and well-behaved. Well, enough of that for a second. Let's have Ozzy, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler throw down some heavy shit, shall we?

So today's very humble One Buck Record Of The Day is an EP, or strictly speaking half an EP. In 2016, to celebrate their The End tour - the last ever Black Sabbath live tour - they sold The End at concerts, an EP (actually, more like a double EP, or simply an album, at fifty-five minutes of length, which does indeed make it longer than 13 itself). The first half were Rick Rubin-produced outtakes from their 13 album, whereas the second half were live tracks. Those were strictIy of the o.k.-ish variety, so I only kept the studio tracks, which were surprisingly good for what are essentially outtakes and deserved to get a proper release either way. 

Rage Against The Machine's Brad Wilk is manning the drum set here for these four songs. "Season Of The Dead" opens with one of Iommi's doomiest riffs, before the vocals kick in, only to open up a machine gun fire of different riffs in the middle. As Ozzy said, when talking about the original sessions for 13 which started a mere 12 years (!) earlier: "Tony was still firing off these amazing heavy metal riffs. He just goes 'here you go' and comes out with one better than you've ever heard in your life. ". "Cry All Night has a neat little blues solo in the middle. "Take Me Home" bring sout more heavt riffage, while "Isolated Man" brings some distorted psychedelia into the mix. 

Speaking of the mix, this was one of the major criticisms of 13 and Rubin especially, with its extremely high loudness levels and high compression. You can hear this also on the four The End tracks, and while it's not a dealbreaker, it does position The End towards the tail end of the Loudness wars (ca. 2005-2015 I'd say). Still, this is probably as good as any latter-day veteran version of Black Sabbath was going to sound. Finally, The End - tour or EP - wasn't, as said above, the end. The end was the way back to beginning, just days before the real end for Ozzy. But The End does stand as a nice reminder of what Sabbath and consequently Oz were all about. Let it rip. 

R.I.P. John Michael "Ozzy" Osbourne (1948-2025)

P.S.: Still on holidays here, folks, with a crap laptop (NEVER buy a Linux-based computer, folks!), so for once there is no artwork attached to the tracks... 

Bluegrass Chartbusters Ahead! Yeehaw and Hotdiggity!

If you have followed this blog for a bit, you already know that, when not listening to folks giving it a neo-traditional spin, I like my bluegrass...weird-ish. I'm down with folks putting hip hop and bluegrass together, and I'm down with a couple of Finns doing bluegrass covers of hard'n'heavy songs. So, it's fair to say I'm not a traditionalist. Still, I wouldn't have bet on engulfing myself as much as I did in bluegrass groups covering popular songs, and I certainly hadn't expected to do so with the help of the Pickin On... series. After albums highlighting bluegrass covers of single artists like Neil Young and Green Day, time to take it a step further and wander through more than fifty years of charts history...via the all-new Bluegrass Chartbusters series!

This album that runs through songs from 1968 to 2015 also doubles as a bit of a Best Of of Cornbread Red, for my money the best band that worked for CMH and the Pickin' On...-series. These guys burned brightly, and quickly - relatively speaking of course - going through ten tribute albums in three years...and then just vanished. Cornbread Red were built around three bluegrass veterans: Stan Dailey on lead vocals and bass, Marc Scott on banjo and mandolin, and Dennis Clifton on guitar, dobro and bouzouki. They recorded those famous blugrass tributes to, among others, Franz Ferdinand, Aerosmith, The Offspring, and Maroon 5, as well as doing the lion's share of the label's two classic rock tributes, from which a majority of their tracks were sourced. Bluegrass bands covering pop and rock songs can always come off as gimmicky and joke-y, and that's kind of the point in a way, but these guys actually found the essence of the songs, instead of just doing fun covers. 

Which means that their versions of these rock and pop classics (and semi-classics) have now supplanted the originals for me. Their version of "Comfortably Numb" is my favorite version of that song, bar none. I've never liked Roger Waters' vocals on the original. I've always liked the melody of "Here Without You" by Three Doors Down, but the compressed nu rock production didn't do it any favors. It's not needed anymore, as isn't the smooth sounds of Maroon 5, whose "You Will Be Loved" is much better as a bluegrass tune than a soft pop number. And finally, I'd probably go out and say that Cornbread Red's version of The Offspring's "Self-Esteem" is also my new favorite take on that number. I liked Steve'n'Seagulls' version fine enough, but that one really tipped over onto the humour side, whereas Cornbread Red's version really finds a sort of logical variation for it, protraying the protagonist loser like a country bumpkin who's getting abused and is too nice to do something about it. You should also check out what they do with Cheap Trick's "Surrender". Good stuff. 

The other 'name' band in CMH's employ is of course Iron Horse out of Alabama (below), who are taking care of the majority of the other tracks here, including Kansas' "Carry On Wayward Son", a cool version of Steve Miller Band's "The Joker", lovely takes on Van Morrison' "Into The Mystic" and Elton John's "Rocket Man", as well as a cover of Kings Of Leon's "Molly's Chambers", the only non-chartbuster here, but a cool version of a cool song, that got the band noticed in the first place. The third band in the Pickin On... stable is The Sidekicks, who more or less replaced Cornbread Red on the roster, though they seem to be less like a real working band and more like a bunch of varying studio pros drafted in for the occasion. Be that as it may,  their take on Hanson's "Mmmbop", for example, does two things: make you understand the lyrics for the first time (try that on the spead up mickey mouse voiced original) and make you appreciate the song (although adult Hanson's acoustic readings of their song are very good as well). They also have a nice, drawl-y take on Blind Melon's "No Rain", their version of Imagine Dragons' "I Bet My Life" is clearly an improvement on the original (not that hard) and a cover of Hootie & The Blowfish's "Only Wanna Be With You". 

This is a fun, rollickin' time, offering often beautiful takes on some of the best known songs from the last half decade. You don't even need to be a particular big fan of bluegrass, armed with even a basic appreciation of acoustic or country-tinged music you'll probably find something to like here. Yeehaw, let the good times roll...

Mixtape Mania Returns! Bowie's Back! In A Ton Of Different Languages!

And the enunciations continue! Stop the press! Hot from the mixing desk! That's Right! Can't Stop Won't Stop!

O.k., enough of this nonsense. But yeah, holiday pastime Bowie mixing is back. It might not have seemed that way, because I spread out my little Bowie mixtapes/megamixes over a year and a half of One Buck Records time, but these were all done in summer 2023, along with the 2.Downtown continuation of the Nathan Adler diaries. And by the end of the summer, I was very well mixed out and Bowie'd out, so I bowed out of Bowie mixing endeavors for a good long while.  But while sorting through my music folders a month or so ago, I realized that at the time I had put a bunch of songs aside for two further mixes, including one with a thematic hook that I really wanted to do. 

And wouldn't you know it, it's the first week of holidays for me, so I could get to work right away, and Bowie mixtape no. 5, fresh from OBG's mixing desk, is here. And if the name of the mix, Babel, hasn't tipped you off yet - it's the first one with a clearly defined theme: Bowie has dabbled, for most of his career, in recording in different languages to cater to his fans worldwide. No one can accuse Bowie of not being a cunning linguist...   

Sometimes he cut a foreign language version because he loved the coutry or the language, as in his two Indonesian-language songs, and sometimes as a career move, such as trying to catch the attention of German schlager listeners in 1967 with a 'German version' (basically one German verse followed by most of the song in English) of "Love You 'Till Tuesday". The same idea is essentially true for the Italian adaptation of "Space Odyssey". Bowie was told that Italians wouldn't get the whole spaceship astronaut thing, so the song was turned into "Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola" - lonely boy, lonely girl. How do you say 'lost in translation' in Italian? 

Some of these tracks went nowhere, such as a barely released Spanish version of "Day-In, Day-Out", others were little gifts to fans, such as the Japanese version of "Girls" as Bowie's habitual bonus track for the Japanese album version of Never Let Me Down, or the French and German adaptations of "Heroes" on those countries' versions of the album of the same name. I also went back to his Berlin trilogy for the Turkish-flavored parts of "Yassassin" and the wordless vaguely Eastern-inspired wailing of"Warszawa", as well as the African rhythms of "African Night Flight" and a snatch of Japanese from "It's No Game". The atmosphere of "Abdulmajid" seemed to fit, so that instrumental track got mixed in as well. This is not supposed to be an 'all non-English music of Bowie, ever' thing, but pretty much everything of significance that isn't English should be here. 

Here's the tally of Bowie's Babel: 2x German, 2x Italian, 2x Indonesian, 1x Spanish, 1x French, 1x Mandarin, plus the above mentioned bits and bops, for the usual 30 minutes of Bowie. 

Bowie the chameleon is one of those easy catchphrases for the genre-hopping artist, but he is also - and definitely -  a chameleon in terms of dealing with these foreign languages. I obviously can't speak for how well he pulls off Indonesian, Japanse and Mandarin, but the Spanish sounds okay. He clearly doesn't speak German and manages with phonetics, while Italian seems to come naturally to him. His accent in French is pretty atrocious, though. But these versions are often more than pure gimmicks, and seem to have been important for Bowie, at one stage or another of his career. Now they can all be enjoyed in one easily digestable 30 minute package which I hope you will enjoy. In any language. 

Michael Johnson's First...And Finest...Feel The Breeze

You know what these All Pearls, No Swine albums are actually good for, besides providing you with a cool 70 minutes of quality music from decades past? Encountering artists you hadn't heard of before, as they did for me, obviously! So today's album is a follow-up to stumbling onto Michael Johnson's cover of Jackson Browne's "My Opening Farewell" on You Tube, then checking out more of Johnson from the same time period. As I opined in my write-up for All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 22, I think Johnson's confident take on the song is better than Browne's original, and it's one of the highlights of There Is A Breeze, our One Buck Record of the day. I hadn't heard of Michael Johnson before, though I'm sure some of y'all oldtimers remember him from an interesting, topsy-turvy career. 

Johnson's first brush with fame came in 1968 when he was drafted into The Mitchell Trio to replace last remaining original member Mike Kobluk, which led Chad Mitchell to disallow the use of his name, with the remaining trio thus becoming Denver, Boise & Johnson, releasing a lone single ("Take Me to Tomorrow") before splitting up. Johnson took some time to plan his next step, stepping away from trecording and touring to star in the off broadway musical Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well and Living In Paris (great title, by the way!).  He signed with Atco Records in 1971, but it took until 1973 for his debut album, the very One Buck Record of the day, to be released. It did only local business in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, so Johnson labored on until The Michael Johnson Album in 1978 with its Top 20 hit "Bluer Than Blue" broke him into the mainstream, albeit as a pure soft rock artist, and those late 70s tracks have a decidedly mainstream adult contemporary, soft rock sheen to them that are less attractive to me personally than these early singer-songwriter songs. At least Johnson played his hand right, veering into contemporary country in the mid-80s and becoming a bona fide country star with two number one hits, though like his colleagues he began to rely on outside songwriters rather than his own compositions. So, let's go back to the beginning instead...

There Is A Breeze is a bit of an odd duck of an album for reasons I will get into, but the highlights of the album are as high as any of his singer-songwriter colleagues of the time. So let's talk quickly about my three favorites from the album (besides "My Opening Farewell"). "Pilot Me" is an true opening statement, in more than one sense. It's open to interpretation, whether the entity the protagonist pleads to to pilot him through the obstacles in his path is a lover, or, you know, god, but it doesn't matter. It's a beautiful, impassioned plea for help and guidance that works both ways. But if I had to pick, I'd say the organ and flugelhorn arrangement points me toward the divine instead of the profane. Either way, it's a beautiful, stately song. 

"On The Road" is a lovely, bouncy memoir to younger, carefree times. "We didn't know who we were, we didn't know what we did, we were just on the road". It's essentially a children's song, as is the song that follows it on thjs version of There Is A Breeze, which means they hit something deeper. You might have just heard it, but you instantly feel like you've known this song for forever. The joyous chikldren's choir is a fantastic flourish. If you don't want to join in the chorus while, listening to this, I don't know what to tell ya. "Rooty Tooty Toot For The Moon", the next track, is rhythmically a lullaby for adults, somewhat like James Taylor's "Sweet Baby James". The chorus might be a big ol' pile of nonsense, but you'll not forget it and will catch yourself singing along to it right away: "Singin' rooty toot toot for the moon / it's the biggest star I've ever seen / It's a pearl of wisdom, a slice of green cheese / Burning just like kerosene, burning just like kerosene". Like "On The Road", you feel you've known this song forever, almost instantly. Total instant classic. 

For a debut album by the traditional acoustic singer-songwriter there is a nice amount of variety here: "In Your Eyes", definitely more wordly than "Pilot Me", is a nice little gallop that is led by country blues-y playing from fellow folkie Leo Kottke on bottleneck guitar, while "I Got You Covered", driven by bass and congas, is kind of jazzy. The title song uses cello and harp to, respectively, and alternatively foreboding and uplifting effect in what is ultimately as gloomy a relationship song, as, say, Browne's "Latye For The Sky", while strings enhance the sad, elegiac "Old Folks", with its fatalistic reminder of "the old, old silver clock / that hangs on the wall / that waits for us all". There is of course a flipside to all these musical flourishes. With four different producers (including Peter Yarrow and Phil Ramone) laboring over the twelve songs, there is a bit of an 'everything but the kitchen sink' approach to proceedings, as if every producer wanted to highlight a different side of Johnson. He himself felt that the debut album wasn't a true reflection of his music and opted for a more traditional acoustic guitar sound for the follow-up. 

But here's the thing: The 'more is more' approach that is applied here makes for listening that never gets into a 'nice, but sounds a little samey' quagmire that the guitar-based singer-songwriter album can sometimes fall into. Say what you will about There Is A Breeze, but it isn't boring. Especially in this slimmed down, all killer no filler version courtesy of good ol' OBG. Well, at least some of these experiments were too much or didn't work, which is why I reconfigured the album, with the old 'addition by substraction' logic. There were two okay-ish horn-driven numbers (a musical direction Johnson tellingly wouldn't follow up on), which I felt was one too many, so I only kept "See You Soon". 

But "Happier Days", the first jettisoned track wasn't an almost fatal mistake, like "Study In E Minor", a glacially paced dirge on acoustic guitar that is exactly what the title says. Except it doesn't go anywhere it hasn't been in the very first seconds, and takes a long time to get there. That track always stopped my enjoyment of There Is A Breeze dead in its tracks and made me hurry to the skip button, so skip it we will. Forever. Also tellingly, that this acoustic guitar tracks is the one produced by Johnson, so he might've felt that this was a true representation of him and his folksy roots. I'd also say if Johnson had delivered an album full of tracks in the "Study In E Minor" mold, I wouldn't be singing his praises here today. Lord knows (and my readership, too, if you've been here for a bit) that I love cohesive albums, but There Is A Breeze wouldn't be the sucess it is without some of the production flourishes. 

Sequencing, however, was another issue, with the album losing momentum a number of times, so I tried to maintain a number of songs in their original spots while improving the flow elsewhere. While shuffling the tracks around for this version of There Is A Breeze, I felt it was important to keep "Pilot Me" as the opener and the framing device of the original sequencing. Side one ended, as it does here, with "Rooty Toot Toot For The Moon", while side two was ended with a very different kind of lullaby: "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught", from the Rogers-Hammerstein musical South Pacific. Its uneasy, provocative take on racism and hatred passed on from generation to generation end There Is A Breeze on a slightly controversial note, allowing the album a moment of political comment. But it also reminds us of the rousing lullaby about that green cheese pearl of wisdom star, and how the lullabies we sing and the stories we tell our children will shape their, and our, lives. 

Michael Johnson got bigger, and the spotlight got brighter, but it is an open question whether he ever bettered There Is A Breeze. It is at least one of the too little known entries in the singer-songwriter canon, that deserves better than its almost total anonymity these days. Get in the breeze, open your ears and see if you'll agree...

Let's Talk About Dick...And By That I Mean Tracy Of Course.

Dick Tracy, the movie was a colossal miscalculation. When the public, spurned on by an unprecedented at the time marketing blitz, made Batman one of the top-grossing movies in 1989, the lesson was not to trot out 1930's era newspaper strip heores out of the moth balls and build wannabe blockbusters around them. The people who liked Batman wanted cool, moody comic book action, and instead in the following years got the pulp hero , newspaper-serial antics of Dick Tracy, The Phantom, The Rocketeer and The Shadow - none of 'em characters that would talk to a young or even semi-young person in 1990. If your target audience in 1990 were senior citizens, that strategy might make sense, but, uh, I'm not sure that was the idea, so most of these flopped pretty hard. Sure, Dick Tracy got the hype and made a ton of money (unlike those other three 'comic book movies'), but not like 'crazy money', and it didn't become a phenomenon like Batman a year before. 

Instead it will mainly be remembered as Warren Beatty's folly, a triumph of art direction, costumes and make up, but with an empty, hollow middle - one-dimensional characters in a one-dimensional, boring narrative. The crazy art direction and impressive costume and set design, as well as the elaborate latex make-up effects, and the idea to at least partly turn Dick Tracy into a musical - there are some bold and commendably crzy choices being made by director and star Warren Beatty - its was a bold swing, but a miss. Every time I watch the movie (which isn't often) I want to like it more than I do, and every time I lose interest once the unique setting and look has settled in. Dick Tracy is a bore. An expensive, elaborate, lovingly assembled bore, but a bore nonetheless. 

The maximalism and miscalculation on display in and with the film, also manifests in its peripherals. Like the music. Trying to be a carbon copy of the preceding year's blockbuster, the Dick Tracy filmmakers hired the very same composer to try and write a very familiar theme and score. There was an official soundtrack album, an exercise in overkill typical of early 90s CDs: a huge amount of bloat, notably by including a number of songs in several versions, despite none of those songs actually making it into the movie. And then of course, we needed a tie-in album from a big pop star, here obviously Beatty's paramour and film co-star Madonna.. If Prince gets to do an entire From And Inspired By' album for Batman, then goshdammit, Madonna will not settle for less. She won't get upstaged by that dwarf from Minnesota! 

And so we get the companion album I'm Breathless, which has a grand total of three songs that were featured in the movie and a nother batcch of 30's-era music pastiches (and, totally unrelated, top notch single "Vogue" attached at the end). So all in all you had to buy three Cds in 1990 for the full Monty Dick experience...and you'd still not get all the music played in the film. So, what about being more humble and condensing all this gigantism into one neat and tidy package, that could have come out in 1990 and might have beeen a better listen than the bloated, too-fat-too-float triple whammy that was proposed? Our One Buck Album will graciously try to fulfill that mission and bring you all you'll arguably need from the film in a tidy 42 minute (well, about 47 with the bonus tracks). 

That means some selections from Danny Elfman's score that is, well, an immediately identifiable Elfman score, whose "Main Title" tries hard to remind people of that other main title for that other comic book character, you know, the one who dresses up like a bat. You'd get the three Madonna songs from I'm Breathless, including "What Can You Lose", a duet with Mandy Patinkin. All of these mixed in with the songs from the soundtrack album that actually feature in the film, all of them more or less chronically arranged. That's what Dick Tracy - Motion Picture Soundtrack is. 

The musical director for the sound track was Andy Paley, once one half of teeniebopper-baiting power pop duo the Paley Brothers with, wait for it, his brother Jonathan. (who might show up on this blog, sooner or later). Afterwards he turned to producing, first turning heads with his work on Brian Wilson's self-titled debut solo album. Dick Tracy project was his biggest and most high-profile gig at the time. On top of producing and assembling the cast, Paley also wrote most of the songs in a faux-1930s style, though of course the big coup of the film's music department was getting Stephen Sondheim for the torch songs Madonna got to sing. Getting back to that cast for a second: There's some relative young guns here in k.d. lang and Erasure, but mostly Paley has assembled heroes and veterans like Brenda Lee, Jerry Lee Lewis and Al Jarreau. And it is fun hearing all of them croon their way through these faux-30s numbers. 

A word on the bonus tracks: These two are from the half dozen or so songs that weren't featured in the movie. LaVern Baker's "Slow Rollin' Mama" uses the old Blues trick of seemingly innocently talking about, in this case, rolling dough, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that she might not only talking about patisserie, if you know what I mean ("I need a big long rollin' pin, to get it ready and right, for my red hot oven"). Fabulously saucy stuff. Darlene Love's "Mr. Fix-It" is in the same pastiche mode as the ret of the tracks for the film, but is one of the best, so highly deserving of being included here, even if there's no trace of it in the film itself. 

And that is that. A single disc, 'has all you need' stop for a fun diversion, that in some ways is a better time than the movie itself. So check out Dick Tracy - Motion Picture Soundtrack (OBG edit) and see if you'll agree...

This is the first in a series of reworked soundtracks coming your way in the next months, often mixing songs and score for a more immersive film flashback experience...

Seventies? Check! All Pearls? Check! No Swine? Check!...Yup, we're good here...

All Pearls, No Swine strike again! As they should! With new projects always taking precedent, I've been neglecting the blog's once flagship series a little bit...but like Bob Dylan's Neverending tour, ANPS will continue, at their own pace. Vol. 29 brings us back to the Seventies, once more, with a roster chock full of artists making their ANPS debut, plus one or two old friends.And if you rightfully think that those last weeks, the One Buck Guy hasn't really indulged much in his beloved country rock, oooh boy, All Pearls, No Swine 29 is going to change that...

All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 29 has indeed a ton of my beloved country rock/Americana, in different flavors and varieties. First there's  J.J. Light and his short trip to "Gallup, New Mexico", which turs a little psychedelic towards the end. Then The Oxpetals come "Down From The Mountain" and bring some tasty harmonies and organ playing with them. Poker Flatts go to a "Lake Of Fire", Comox And Friends hang out with (or are?) "Beautiful Losers", whileJoyous Noise add more than a bit of r'n'b and soul, if not outright funk, to "Funky Lady". APNS alumni Mark Jones brings the harrowing "Lion Trap", a bleak look at people going nowhere in a dead end job in a dead end ton that's bleak as hell and precedes the No Depression sound by fifteen years. Country Ward, not in APNS action since Vol. 6, bring an old-chool country weeper with the sentimental "Just Another Country Dream" while Chicago-era band Aliotta Haynes - named after their members, the Aliotta brothers Mitch and Ted, and guitar player Skip Haynes -  crank up the harmony-singing to eleven for ultra-lovely "Brother Sparrow". After Ted quit the band right after their debut album, they would add John Jeremiah on keyboards and continue as Alliotta, Haynes & Jeremiah.

Seriously, could these dudes look any more like the 70s?

Aslan have more of a folk sound which they bring to "Sonshine", as do City Freez with the lovely "City Talkin'", while Les Dudek's grovy "Cruisin' Groove" reminds you quite a bit of Little Feat's funkier numbers. Though a big influence on little brother Sweet Baby James, Alex Taylor never really made it as a recording artist, and is arguably only on third place in the Taylor brother hierarchy, after James and Livingston. Still, he was from time to time cranking out good stuff, slightly more rough-hewn than the softer voices of his two brothers, though still plenty smooth. 

You wouldn't expect a band from Fresno to be called Folly's Pool, and you definitely wouldn't think that they would mix their harmony-laden California folk-rock with a more than heavy sprinkle of U.K.-styled prog rock. Yet that's what they did, creating their version of folk-prog, as on the song that gave the band its name (or vice versa?).

If you didn't know any better, you'd say this is a '90s alternative rock album...

The ladies bring a bit of a different flavor to things. Mary Asquith's take on "Cocaine" has shades of Janis Joplin, while being distinctively British, befitting of Manchester's 'queen of blues and folk', whereas Dory Previn's brutal tale of "Mary C. Broown and The Hollywood Sign" uses music hall for its impressively bleak tale of Hollywood horrors. And then Bill Madison rides out All Pearls, No Swine 29's grooves with a tour on the prairies for "Buffalo Skinners", closing the circle and ending up where we started, with a piece of psychedelic Americana.  

Even though All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 29 is admittedly quite heavy on country rock/Americana numbers, the variety on display here should please the discerning APNS afficionado. 

Slip Away On That Carefree Highway With Gordon Lightfoot

So, here comes part two of the huge Lightfoot retrospective I recently started. Disc Two of A Life In Song, this time covering most of Gordon's prime period, from 1971 to 1976. Same deal as the first disc: I'll run through the albums and from time to time explain why I picked the tracks I picked. Overall, Carefree Highway is probably the most consistently listenable of the three volumes, due to Gord widening his commercil and popular appeal and opening up his sound. Having three of his biggest smashes - "undown", "Carefree Highway" and "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald" on here - doesn't hurt either. So, let's check what's going on on this Carefree Highway, shall we? 

Don Quixote is the last album of Lightfoot as a tried-and-true folkie. Orchestrations or not, up until this album his songs were still esssentially acoustic folks songs. That would change withh the following album, when for the first time Lightfoot would employ a drummer, as well as upping the country instrumentation, notably making the pedal steel a fixed part of his instrumental repertoirse. Don Quixote is also one of Gord's best, a thoroughly enjoyable record without a weak track on it, which made picking songs for this comp difficult. The classic title song and his ode to the area of his childhood (and summer sailing trips) "Christian Island -Georgian Bay)" were obvious picks. I have always loved "Looking At The Rain", a classic Lightfoot ballad that was written around the time of the Sit Down Young Stranger/If You Could Read My Mind album a year before and sounds like it. Which leaves essentially one spot for another track. I'm sure many would vote for the jaunty "Alberta Bound" with Ry Cooder's mandolin playing, but my pick is "Brave Mountaineers", a song that summarizes what early Lightfoot was about. A lilting, memorable melody and chorus, uncluttered instrumentation, even some whistling during the outro - this song could have easily come from any of the albums preceding it, being a nice capper to that first phase of Lightfoot. 

Old Dan's Record is a conundrum in Lightfoot's discography, and especially in the context of the albums surrounding it. It is the great lost Lightfoot classic, an album long out of print and essentially forgotten. I knew it existed, thanks to the inclusion of the title track on Gord's Gold, but could never find it, so when Rhino issued it on CD for the first time in the early 2000's I had to get it just out of pure curiosity. And you know what? It's totally unfairly buried deep in his discography, as it's one of his best. It's also, as hinted above, a precursor of things to come, notably a more modern, radio-friednly sound. But what's relly striking about Old Dan's Records is the country influence. It's essentially Gord's country record, as you can easily see in the four picks of the album. I'd have more to say about it, but strongly consider posting the whole thing on here some day, so I'll just leave it at that, merely pointing out that "It's Worth Believin'" is one of my favorite Lightfoot songs and that "You Are What I Am" is a weirdly neglected charting single, never making any Greatest Hits package. 

And then of course Lightfoot hit it big with Sundown, the song and the album. "Sundown" the song is of course an improbable number one hit song - it has an amiable acoustic shuffle and a singalong chorus, which no doubt helped propel it to the top spot, but it's a very weird singalong - the lyrics are surprisingly dark, even menacing ("you better take care if I find you been creepin' 'round my back stairs"), ostensibly about Lightfoot's jealousy while in a relationship with groupie Cathy Smith - and the sweaty, nervy atmosphere Lightfoot evokes is almost unpleasant, yet couched in Gord's friendly, folk-pop sound it sounds like an upbeat song of some sort if you're not taking care what you are singing or humming along to. "Carefree Highway", the follow-up single, also became a top ten hit. Lightfoot's seafaring classic "High & Dry" has to be here, and the last selection from the album, "The Watchman's Gone" , is an underrated classic from the period and captures the wanderlust theme that underlies about half of the album. It has one of Lightfoot's most memorable melodies, yet has never been put on a compilation of any kind. Weirdly, Lightfoot only put a scant three selections from Sundown on his Songbook box set, essentially relegating his biggest seller to the status of a minor album. 

Lightfoot had all the career momentum in the world, so it was too bad that he couldn't really back it up with another quality batch of songs, as I would say that 1975's Cold On The Shoulder is one of his weaker efforts. Sounding fine while it plays, it simply isn't very memorable. "Rainy Day People" became an adult contemporary number one hit, based on Lightfoot's charts momentum, and I like the melody of "All The Lovely Ladies", even if the arrangement drifts a little too much into adult contemporary. The secret classic, or at least my secret classic, of the album is "The Soul Is The Rock", a more ambitious and epic song than most of its brethren. It is certainly odd, both in its possibly religious undertones ("live like a sheep, die like a lamb") and the weird allegories it uses. Slightly repetitive it might be, but it's hard to get the song's melody out of your head. 

After a decade of recording, Lightfoot compiled his first 'official' hits package, the double LP Gord's Gold, as United Artists had continued to throw 'Best Of's' of his five album-tenure there on the market, as soon as "If You Could Read My Mind" made him a star, and Warner/Reprise decided it was time to counter that. Rather than licensing songs from United Artists, Lightfoot took the package as a way to reinterpret and re-imagine his early recordings in his then recent folk-pop style, giving these songs fuller arrangements that the earlier, folkier work didn't have: drums, steel guitar, orchestration. Some purists might hate these remakes, but since this is essentially (at least for me) Lightfoot's signature sound, I love them and prefer a number of them to the originals. And that is why you get "For Lovin' Me" in the 1975 version, as well as the medley of "I'm Not Sayin'/Ribbon Of Darkness". And despite the song being featured on Vol. 1, you'll also get the 1975 remake of "Canadian Railroad Trilogy". It's an interesting case study in 'same but different'. Arrangement and lyrics are the same, but the song's slightly slower tempo, the addition of whining steel guitar and Lightfoot's by this time weathered voice give an entirely different feel to the song. While the original with its enthusiastic acoustic strumming and Lightfoot's youthful voice seemed to emphasize the pioneering spirit and wonder of achievement present in the song, the version from eight years later seems to emphasize the losses and loneliness of the endeavor, sommething the ever-touring, slididng into middle-age Lightfoot would know a thing or two about.  

While Cold On The Shoulder had been only so-so, Lightfoot struck back a year later with his last classic album, and one of his all-time best, Summertime Dream. Not only did it have his last big chart hit, and best story-telling song, "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald"  (already discussed at great lengths here). But a set of well-written songs and committed performances, for his most consistent album since, arguably, Don Quixote. There are, in fact, so many quality songs here - and I still had to drop antiwar song "Protocol" - that the Summertime Dream songs will spill over onto Vol. 3, but you get a trio of great songs: opener "Race Among The Ruins", a wonderful, weirdly underrated song, the album's sprightly title track, and of course "Edmund Fitzgerald" as the moody album closer. 

A Life In Song Vol. 2 - Carefree Highway covers Lightfoot's commercial zenith as a folk-pop crossover star, and it has a ton of classics that yiou should either add to your collection, or relisten to again. Whether you are a Lightfoot neophyte or afficionado, getting on that carefree highway to listen to some of the most beautiful music of the 1970s should in either case be your next destination...

 

 

Bruce And The Promise Of The Forgotten Albums

It's not easy being a music fan invested in the Bruce Springsteen's music. Not because there are weird detours like his sould excursion Only The Strong Survive but because he is now entering a phase of his career where curating his work becomes more pressing for him, which means that there is more and more of all the famously discarded material now officially available, as made evident by The Promise chronciling all the songs recorded in the run-up to Darkness On The Edge Of Town or The Ties That Bind - The River Collection. Added to that there are the demos and other scraps that stay unoffcially unreleased and there is just so much music to go through. Famously prolific, it is said that for every album Springsteen does bring out, there is at least another (or an entirely different version of it) that stays in the vaults, and that is true. Sometimes, there is more than one. Sometimes there is more than two. Springsteen's vault of unreleased material literally has hundreds of unreleased songs in various states of composition and mastering.

Like every Springsteen fan, I'm dabbling in arranging and re-arranging this material, and the release of lat week's Tracks II boxset, including seven albums of material, is a good an excuse as any to get back into the alt Bruce business. Actually, the last dib into OBG versions of Bruce stuff, Don't Back Down, was due to the box set coming out, as I wanted to get my version out before the official one did last week. With that out of the way, we can now go back and settle into a more chronological approach, which means back to the mid-70s we go... 

The Promise, the album that is the One Buck Record of the day, largely but not exclusively draws from the compilation of the same name that covers songs Bruce recorded beteen 1976 and 1978 to create a companion piece to Darkness On The Edge Of Town. The idea was to make it a brighter, more optimistic companion, while not necessarily abandoning entirely Bruce's preoccupations and themes on Darkness. This isn't an all-out party or 'let's celebrate we're young' record, which are albums you possibly could have made out of the The Promise box set. No, this is an album that looks for balance, for some light in between the moments of doubt and darkness that you can still see and feel in the distance. I didn't want to go overbaord and create an anti-Darkness, but rather an album that feels like it could stand alongside that work while also being able to stand on its own as an album. 

So you get the optimistic opening punch of "Rendezvous" that clearly recalls Born To Run musically and lyrically ("we'll be riders,through all of the night") and was first issued by Greg Kihn in the late 70s, but also mood pieces like "The Preacher's Daughter", a Darkness outtake that is the only officially unreleased song on here and one of my faves of Bruce's stash of still unreleased songs. And there's the title cut, which lyrically would have fit like a glove on Darkness. Still, I realized that even though I didn't want to do another Darkness, I was inevitably drawn to the moodier, more serious songs rathar than Bruce's tribute-pastiches to Buddy Holly, The Animals or 60s girl groups, so The Promise did end up being a bunch of slower, moodier tunes anway, so I drafted in his version of "Because The Night" to make it a little more lively. 

I probably did it unconsciously, but the album seems itself to do the bridge between Born To Run and Darkness, having the numbers that sound most like Born To Run ("Rendezvous", "Iceman","City Of Night") on the first side, while side two gets moodier and more downbeat, even as Bruce's protagonists try to hold on to notions of romance and optimism in "Hearts Of Stone" or "The Way". But even the song's protagonists urging "Come On (Let's Go Tonight)" - the early version of Darkness' "Factory" -  has something desperate to it. They want to shed their troubles downton, but Elvis is dead, and there is nothing to do about 'em anyway. Fittingly for an album that starts with the promise of a "Rendezvous" and the ringing sounds of Born To Run, the album ends in a darkness on the edge of town, just down Thunder Road. During the long coda of "The Promise", Bruce's protagonists find themselves on Thunder Road once more, but the road, and its promises have irrevocably changed. Where in the original song, Thunder Road was the promise of an unknown, but surely better future, this Thunder Road is a road to nowhere, a dead end street. 

The idea of my version of The Promise as to spotlight a number of absolute top notch Springsteen songs, that - scattered as they are on Tracks, The Promise and the vaults, don't necessarily get their due. Here, they make sense together, they give sense to each other, and they are appreciable as another, slightly sunnier path through the dark roads the boss was cruising and choosing in 1978. If the promise of The Promise is, to have a real album made of these things that the Boss couldn't or wouldn't quite fit together, then I not quite humbly say, promise fulfilled. What say you? 

Count 'em. It's one...two...three...four..Roscoes!

Generally speaking, I'm not a huge fan of remixes. Often, they don't add much to the original. Or, conversely, they change so much, that the original is hardly recognizable anymore. However, sometimes, a remix can reveal a cool side of a song that you didn't see before. Such is the case with today's very short One Buck Record (more of a One Buck EP, actually). I stumbled upon these a little like I stumbled upon Midlake itself and their fantastic The Trials Of Van Occupanther., recently resequenced for a better listening experience.  As said on the write-up to taht post, the album was almost a total blind buy, other than a little blurb from a music store employee I believe, and possibly a song I heard on one of those music samplers that were popular with music magazines, in this case Rolling Stone. 

The song that might have been on that sampler, and the one that opens Trials and puts people under the spell of Midlake's strange alchemy? That would be "Roscoe", the song that gets put through the (remix) wrnger on this little offering. The song is perfect, in that it already brings everything the album will do to the table.It's also a weird little tune, as most on Trials are: "if I could change my name to something a little more productive like Roscoe". Say what? 

I don't feel like dancin', no, sir, no dancin' today...

The surprising thing about this song is how elastic it is. Before stumbling upon these remixes, I hadn't necessarily thought of "Roscoe" as a song you can dance to, yet these three variations bring out that part of the song, to various degrees. The 'Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve Mix' that opens this EP emphasizes the song's dreamy side, while also retaining a dance-able rhythm. The 'Justin Robertson Remix goes full dance beat with 80s keyboard motifs, that the band probably would approve of, added to the mix. The 'Fading Soul Remix', while also maintaining a dance-able rhythm seems to put an emphasis on the melancholy side of the song. And to remind you how good the original is, I added a live version of the song to the end, if you want a purer "Roscoe" than the very dancehall-ready other three. 

But why would you? These are just way cooler than they have any right to be, which is why I wanted to share them with you. So, get ready to get to know Roscoe 1, Roscoe 2, Roscoe 3 and Roscoe 4. Groovy, baby!

All Pearls, No Swine Megapack Part Two

Yeah, yeah, more rummagging, with the first 90's-bound APNS racking up over 60 views AND NO DAMN REQUEST FOR A LINK. It's really easy, folks. Unless, you know, you'd just like to read stuff, which is fine also. 

So, as I've seen some other APNS-related activity for Volume 14 and 20, here's the same deal as last time. You get the megapack with volumes 11-20, I don't have to wander into half a dozen threads to upload. EVEN IF NO ONE ASKS FOR A DAMN LINK!

And then, as a way of saying 'hi' or 'thanks', you can leave a comment on whether you actually like the music you find herewithin...

Deal?

Deal!

The David Bowie Alt Album Super Duper Extra Bonus Package

Going along with the second volume of the We've Got You Covered series for all you Bowie-lovers out there and also because I realized some rummaging in Mr. Bowie's back catalogue, especially the Young Americans and 1. Outside alts, here's the simple package reupload deal for, I suppose, all those new visitors from Brazil (Olà!) and Vietnam (Xin chào!)...I don't know how y'all got here, but welcome! Now you just have to simply ask for a link instead of just going through the backlog in vain! 

Anyway, uncle OBG's got you, so here are in one tidy package all alt albums of Bowie that I've done: The OBG version of Never Let Me Down, 1. Outside sequel/side-quel  2.Downtown, and the whole plastic soul extravaganza of Young Americans - The Complete Edition and Shilling The Rubes. This summer I might get back into some Bowie work to go along with these, but to visitors, old and new, here's the Bowie megapackage if any of you need it...or want it...as usual there's tons of info in the accompanying write-ups. 

Update: Heureka! Some have (or one has?) seen how easy it is to ask for a link. Thanks, "unknown"! (Next step: sign with an nickname...any nickname). So, the Byrds alt album mega pack, this one, is now re-upped, as are the two Beach Boys alt albums and Alice Coper's Ruckus At The Movies. That should keep some of y'all occupied...