I Do The Rock...

...in a random fashion. Too Long Gone.

Last week Brando played with the Genius mixes to come up with new ways to mix up the music. Like Brando, I mostly listen to music during the work day. Heck, all day; my Giger-pod is my inseparable companion. Usually everything is just on full shuffle, because hey I just advance over the stuff that doesn't hit the sweet spot. "If you don't love what's playing, it isn't worth it." I wish I could remember who said that....

Anyway, unlike Brando, I haven't felt unduly hampered by the iTunes playback options. but I have many many playlists also.


35,797 songs, 152 gigs and change. 96 days of noise. iTunes seems to have picked up a sub-theme this week, see if you can spot what it is.... or maybe I'm just seeing something, reading it into the music. Or the music is allowing me to connect a couple of disparate thoughts....

1. Perfect Day, Lou Reed. From The Raven. Vocal by Antony Hegarty. I loved this album (the long version, with spoken word pieces). Critics hated it. But hey, it's no Metal Machine Music.

I like Lou, but for every New York, there is a Mistrial. It seems like there's a bit of lack of focus. Is it the drugs? Who knows? But I AM grateful this wasn't Sex With Your Parents or Like A Possum.

2. The Bar's on Fire, Bottle Rockets. From that to alt-swamp-rock. A bit disconcerting, but that's how Friday goes.

3. Drugstore, Stabbing Westward. Shortlived NIN knockoff, but since I like NIN, they sound pretty bracing on a cloudy early morning with rain on the way.

4. Non-Photo Blue, Pinback. Nice angular modern rock. Sounds like half of the bands I listened to in the 90s.

5. Nearly Home, Broken Records. Disappeared Friend Zelmo hooked me up with this.

For while, One of the problems with having 30,000 songs or so, is that new music gets swallowed up before I have a chance to listen to it and internalize it. You know how when something is new, you need to listen to it several times? Hard to do when you forget you have it on your hard drive.

Solved that problem by creating an automatic playlist that has anything added in the last 7 weeks or so. Unfortunately, the Broken Record got lost in the time before.

Zelmo? You out there?

6. They Got Lost, They Might Be Giants. Hilariously mis-introduced in a live version as "They Must Be Giants". Have seen John and John a couple of times now, and they are surprisingly tight in a live setting. We are going to see them in Madtown at teh Barrymore next month.

7. Home To Houston, Steve Earle. From the superb The Revolution Starts Now, a story of a trucking contractor yearning to come home from our War Zones.

The stories of the contractors are a largely unknown part of the Bush Wars. How many are being killed and injured? Nobody tells, the mercenaries are not obligated to report like the military is.

But for all the publicized nastiness perpetrated by the contractors, rape and violence and naked parties, I feel confident that many of these guys are just working stiffs, trying to do a job, pay the bills, and get home in one piece.

The reliance of our government on these entities to fill the gap created by a desire for full scale war but now political will to enact the draft in order to do so, is another of the appalling stories created by Georgy and Dick's MidEastern MisAdventure.

8. Big Shot In The Dark, Timbuk 3. After hitting it huge with the Future's So Bright, they continued writing intelligent, darkly comic songs and fleshing out their sound. Of course, the record company was waiting for another frat-rock hit; since the first was a fluke, it wasn't going to happen.

But as musicians and artists will, they kept on doing what they do, because they have to. eventually the label lost interest, dropped them; they split up the band and their marriage. Pat McDonald still floats around here from time to time. They were originally from Madison, did I mention that? He had a power pop band for a while called Pat McDonald and The Essentials. Eventually they formed Timbuk 3 and moved to Austin.

9. We're An American Band, The New Duncan Imperials. Chicago drunken punk band doing a cover of the Guess Who. Heh. From an EP consisting of cover songs about being in a band called We're In A Band. Surprisingly straightlaced cover. Nice lead in, however, to....

10. Going Down To Mexico, ZZ Top. I saw them on the Deguello tour when I was in High school. Remember Cheap Sunglasses? That one. They were amazing.

They were lucky to find a gimmick of sorts that timed with the rise of teh Music Video as the only way to sell records, and were massively huge for a while. eventually MTV turned into the Jackass Station, and music videos became mostly acknowledged as the overpriced ads they are. And through all that, ZZ Top just kept on doing what they do.

My friend Ror and I saw them at the Pabst last year, and they were just the same. Maybe not nearly so loud.

11. Alone At Midnight, The Smithereens. Another band I've seen at Summerfest and someplace else, I forget where. Another band that has been together forever, and although I thought they had broken up and Pat DiNizio was going solo, Wiki tells me that a new disc is coming out in January.