I know how I overlooked it when it first came out. 1979? I was deep in the throes of disco. While other genres occasionally broke into my consciousness at the time, what I call traditional FM pop/rock wasn’t one of them. But seriously…I never gave this one a second glance until a few days ago based on some strong recommendations from the Reddit, and I slip on my headphones and just get lost in it. I can now understand why it’s ranked among some of the best albums (and recordings) ever made.
45 years on and it still makes the hairs stand up on my arms.
Some memories that are inextricably tied to this track:
Two Marks. Two Geminis. It was doomed from the start, but somehow we became lifelong friends. I haven’t heard from him him in years, so I just fired off an email to his last known address.
This album—although never a commercial success (and as far as I know, the group’s only release)—holds a very special place in my heart. One of the few pieces of vinyl to survive my expensively-stupid great purge in the late 80s, I still have the original white vinyl copy that Steve Golden gave me all those many, many years ago.
Needless to say, it was quite a treat to stumble across the CD in 2024.
Ella Fitzgerald – Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Cole Porter Songbook (1997 reissue)
I know I’ve featured this album before in another context, but fuck it. This is my blog and I’ll do what I want.
Love is Love and all that, indeed, but so many of Cole Porter’s songs take on an additional, personal—color—when you consider he was a gay man who—if only subconsciously—wrote these songs as if they were being sung to another man.
I love Miles Davis, but I’m still trying very hard to like and appreciate this one. I put on Miles to relax, and Bitches Brew is anything but relaxing.
I have several suggestions both from here and Reddit on which way to go from here in regard to exploring the Miles Davis catalog, but it seems my CD budget is always getting pulled in some other direction. (Most recently I have the soundtrack to Sweet Charity on order.)
Sometime in 1987 or thereabouts, on one our many little tribe’s outings via ferry from SF to Sausalito (being newly-relocated desert rats we enjoyed any time on the water we could), I first heard this album. It was playing in one of the many New Age souvenir/crystal shops that dotted the main drag at the time and I was immediately enchanted. Fortunately I didn’t have to go far to get a copy, as they had an extensive in-store CD selection for sale.
Playing this always envokes the emotion of that afternoon if even the now sadly degraded memories of what actually expired outside that shop are fleeting.
I took Sophie in for her annual shots this morning.
“Dad! I do NOT like this! Can we please go home?”
She was such a good girl however, that we stopped for a pup cup on the way home.
Prior to leaving this morning, I was about to do my usual breakfast routine, but discovered I was out of the Kate Farms solution (haven’t received my monthly supply from the healthcare distributor and my most recent order from Amazon hadn’t arrived yet), so I combined my iced coffee with two cartons of isosource. All was well and good until right before I left for the vet and the most horrific reflux hit. Apparently I overdid it on the volume and my stomach didn’t like it one bit.
The worst part of not being able to swallow is when you get reflux. If everything were functioning properly, I’d whip up a glass of baking soda solution, swallow it, and everything would be right as rain. Unfortunately, that’s no longer an option. Yeah, I can still do the baking soda solution via the g-tube (after using the tube to drain the excess stomach contents) to quiet my stomach, but there’s no way of immediately relieving the burn left in my throat from the reflux. And of course there was a certain amount of aspiration, so my O2 (after being 98-100% for weeks now) took a—thankfully brief—nosedive to under 90%. It’s since recovered to the mid 90s, but damn…it wiped me out and I wanted nothing more upon returning home than to take a nap.
That’s passed now, but it’s still going to be a very low-key, quiet afternoon and Joey Alexander is a perfect accompaniment for that.
