Category: Music

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Remember When CDs Used To Be AWESOME?

Well apparently they are again! I thought that I’d been whistling past the graveyard for the last two years with my purchasing, but apparently CD sales are actually on the rise again. It seems GenZ is discovering them for the first time and everyone else is rediscovering them.

Despite my current obsession with MiniDiscs, CDs are still “where it’s at” as far as I’m concerned, and—when I really want to get into my music with no distractions—my preferred method of listening. (See: Japanese Jazz) Still, I was surprised when I went down to the library a few weeks ago and discovered that yes, Virginia—they still have those shiny plastic discs available to check out.

Back in the 00’s when I found myself out of work and undergoing cancer treatment, the library and it’s music collection was my refuge. It afforded me a cost-free opportunity to explore music that would never have crossed my path otherwise. And yes, while I did rip everything I liked onto MiniDiscs or CDRs at the time, when funds allowed I did buy copies of what I’d checked out because I wanted the complete experience including owning the original discs themselves and enjoying the liner notes that accompanied them (something the library did remove from their offerings).

And I find myself in the same position now. Not undergoing cancer treatment (knock on wood), but exploring new musical venues via the Phoenix Library. Yeah, I still rip the CDs to iTunes and onto MDs, but I also end up buying the original CDs for the same reasons I did twenty years ago. (And it’s not like the library doesn’t know what you’re doing; when you check these out your receipt says, “You just saved $13.99 by checking this out.”

 

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Recommended…If You’re Into That Sort Of Thing

I’ve had one Buddha-Bar recording (volume VI) in my iTunes for years. Probably picked it up from the Phoenix Library during the summer of 2003 when I wasn’t working and undergoing cancer treatment. I pulled it up a couple weeks ago and burned it onto a MiniDisc and I’ve really been enjoying it, but curiosity led me to explore the other volumes in the series. Sadly, nothing came up in the library catalog search, but YouTube surprisingly delivered! I liked Volume 2 so much I snagged a physical copy from Discogs that arrived yesterday and I’m really loving it, and by the time you read this I probably will have already ordered Volume 1.

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Released 50 Years Ago Today

Sir Elton must be feeling old…as am I.

Elton John: Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (1975)

This was probably the most-anticipated album release of my youth, and has remained my all time favorite EJ album my entire life. The entire album is pure genius from beginning to end. My favorite song from the album, Better Off Dead, is posted above.

Produced by Gus Dudgeon, it was recorded at the Caribou Ranch in Nederland, CO from June – July 1974. After the successful Caribou album, the prolific musician returned to the Caribou Ranch recording studio in the Colorado Rockies to record his next release. The concept album is an autobiographical account of Elton John and Bernie Taupin and the struggles they faced at the beginning of their musical careers. The single Someone Saved My Life Tonight, is about John’s half-hearted suicide attempt while he was engaged to a woman, faced with choosing her over his musical career (and still struggling with his sexual orientation at the time). His friend and former band mate Long John Baldry convinced him to break off the engagement (whom John’s refers to in the song as “Sugar Bear”). The album also marks the last time that John recorded with drummer Nigel Olsson and bassist Dee Murray until the Too Low For Zero album in 1983. Captain Fantastic makes history when it becomes the first album to ever enter the Billboard Top 200 at number one. For the original LP release, a limited number of promotional copies are pressed on translucent brown vinyl, with each album jacket autographed by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. The album is remastered and reissued on CD in 1995 with the stand alone singles Philadelphia Freedom, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, and Elton’s cover of the John Lennon penned One Day A Time (B-side of Lucy), added as bonus tracks. Out of print on vinyl since 1989, the album is remastered and reissued in 2017. Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy spends seven weeks (non-consecutive) at number one on the Billboard Top 200, and is certified 3x Platinum in the US by the RIAA.

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Released 45 Years Ago Today

Grace Jones: Warm Leatherette (1980)

My favorite—or maybe second favorite—Grace Jones album. I can never definitively say if this or Nightclubbing is my favorite, followed closely by Slave to the Rhythm in third place. Both Warm Leatherette and Nightclubbing are so good they could easily have been released as a double LP.

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I Was Busy This Afternoon

I saw today that Robert Pattinson has presumably been signed on to play Scytale (the Tleiaxu Face Dancer) and primary antagonist in Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming Dune Messiah project. Pattinson is one of those actors I simultaneously love and hate, which may actually be a good thing considering the character he’ll be playing in the film.

All this got me to thinking and I realized I haven’t read Messiah in probably fifteen years at least, but acknowledging I now have the attention span of a gnat when it comes to reading, I still wanted to give it a go. To that end, I thoought a little musical accompaniment might be in order, so I ripped the various Villeneuve Dune soundtracks I have stored in my laptop to MiniDisc this afternoon.

I have all of Frank Herbert Dune novels in Kindle, so when I was done recording, I put the music on in the background and fired up the app. It seems to have worked wonders for keeping me focused. I’m about a quarter way through the novel and despite my disappointment of certain aspects of what Velleneuve did with the second Dune film, I’m very much looking forward to seeing what he brings to the silver screen with this story.

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Rediscovering A Few Old Friends

Hard to believe these are 25 years old. These double-CD sets were my constant companions once upon a time, and stumbling upon them while going through my iTunes in search of music to transfer to MiniDisc after so many years of neglect has done wonders for my mood. I also discovered that when I went to purchase them again on Discogs that at one point I had marked them as already being in my collection—meaning they—and a half dozen of their Euphoria brethren were in that banker’s box that was lost after the fire. They weren’t cheap then, and they’re not cheap now, but definitely worth replacing.

Yes, I have them ripped to iTunes, but the original CDs were continuous mixes, meaning that once they’re burned to any other medium from iTunes—whether it be to another CD or a MiniDisc—there’s now an annoying little split-second gap between tracks that isn’t present on the original recording. And yes, while I know there are so many more important other things that are happening while Rome burns that should be commanding my attention, and in the overall scheme of things this is silly, but not having that gap is still important to me, as it’s one small thing in my life that I do have some control over.

So they’ve been ordered, and their siblings will be replaced as funds allow. A couple are coming from overseas, and frankly—after the events of the past couple weeks—I fully expected to receive notice that the seller does not ship to the U.S. any longer (because I have seen it appear in some listings). But so far all is good; my funds were readily accepted and I was provided with tracking numbers for the shipments.

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This Guy Gets It

Nostalgia. It’s a hell of.a drug. I’ve said it before.

Randy gets it, and is the first person I’ve seen so succinctly sum up what I feel whenever I put on a CD or rip a new MiniDisc. It just feels good. And as a collector, the dopamine rush of walking into a thrift store or our local Hard-Off, not knowing what I may find lurking on those shelves, or when a new-to-me piece of gear that I probably overpaid for arrives in the mail is exactly as he points out.

I grew up with vinyl as a teenager, spent my 20s and 30s with the arrival and peak market of CDs (I remember to this day the smell when you walked into Tower Records), and ended my 30s and spent my 40s with MiniDiscs. Even though the whole cancer thing occurred when I was deep into MD (I remember having my Sony MZ-S1 at the hospital, listening to whoever was on my radar at the time) I still have so many fond memories associated with the format.

I look at my music collection and think, “That’s me. That’s my vibration.” And even though my tastes have expanded over the years, every one of those recordings is a part of who I am.

And since everything I buy is used from individuals, it gives a stiff middle finger to the orange felon’s tariff madness.

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I Won’t Say It’s My Muse, But…

Among my iTunes to MD transfers yesterday was Philip Glass’ Satyagraha. I first heard this piece leaking through a wall I shared with a Folsom Street neighbor in San Francisco sometime in 1988 or thereabouts. I didn’t know what it was—and this was long before Shzam and SoundHound (hell, I hadn’t even bought my first modem at that point) were around to identify songs—but I recognized Philip Glass’ unmistakable signature and went next door to finally meet the hunky neighbor who’d moved in a few weeks earlier and find out what was playing.

(Finding fellow Glass aficionados is pretty rare, TBH.)

Like nearly all of Philip’s work, Satyagraha just plays me, but this one in particular—possibly more than even Akhnaten or the Koyannisqatsi soundtrack—reaches in on a deep, fundamental level. I haven’t listened to this in years, but it was calling out to me as I scrolled through my library in search of things I wanted to transfer to physical media. I got about halfway through listening last night before my body was demanding sleep, but in that time—oh boy—it still packed a punch.

I won’t go so far as to say this recording is my muse, but many, many years ago I put it on one day after I got home from a particularly stressful day at work, and by the time we got to Act 2 – Tagore, Scene 1 the music was all but screaming at me to get off my butt, pull out a blank canvas that had been gathering dust in a closet for months, and start painting.

This was the result of that push:

“Joe” (2004)

I won’t say the music had the same effect on me last night as it did twenty-one years ago, but damn if it didn’t clear away cobwebs, sweep away years worth of accumulated emotional and mental gunk, and as the woo-woo crowd might say, “aligned my chakras.”

Postscript 3/26/25: Well, it seems I’ve written about this before. If it sounded vaguely familliar to any of my long-time readers, thank youfor not pointing it out and making me feel even more addled than I do for discovering it myself.  I wonder how many duplicate subjects I’ve covered in the 20 years of this blog. Probably more than I care to know…

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Blast From The Past

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I stumbled upon this collection of house music back in the mid 00’s and immediately fell in love with it, adding them all to my iTunes library. They were perfect “background” music for working on the computer or around the house.

I eventually got rid of the original CDs (along with most of the rest of my collection) after we moved to Denver and the music pretty much fell off the radar.

But a few weeks ago I rediscovered house music on YouTube via the Yoyaku Record Store and Humano Studios channels, and it was at this point I rememberd Bargrooves, and immediately ripped them from iTunes onto MiniDiscs.

Imagine my shock then when I first listened to my newly ripped discs and uniformly hated every one of them! “I liked this stuff?” I asked myself.

The other day I was going through disks and retitling everything (one of the perks of the format) and while pulling up the track lists on Discogs I realized that the songs I’d ripped to iTunes all those many years ago were completely out of order. It’s no wonder I hated the sets…there was no continuity, no “groove” as it were.

Thankfully, another perk of MiniDiscs is that you can rearrange tracks to play in whatever order you want. So—even though they were originally ripped in the wrong order—I was able to reshuffle them into their proper sequence and voila! my love for this music returned.

The only problem is that there’s now a break in between each of the tracks (the downside of ripping from iTunes) so I’ve tracked the original discs down on Discogs—for cheap!—and should be receiving them next week so I can gaplessly re-record them onto MD.

I can hear you all now: “He’s such a nerd.”

Yup.

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It’s Not Awful

I just discovered this bootleg collection of unreleased tracks from Madge’s Rebel Heart sessions. I don’t understand the online hate regarding these songs. Granted, some of them aren’t her best work, but it can be argued that entire albums she’s released aren’t her best work. A few of the songs are actually quite good and for the life of me I can’t understand why they weren’t released with Rebel Heart.

If you’re interested, you can hear the album here.

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