JSngry

I can go out in front of my house with a jackhammer and make a pothole in 30 minutes or less. The Grand Canyon, on the other hand...

Immediately after graduating from high-school, I got a summer job working in a liquor store.

Well, yes and no. I mean, potholes aren't necessarily "good", but they exist. They're real as can be, as are the conditions that create them. Can't ignore them or deny that they're there. They are even, in an odd enough way, part of the "ugly beauty" that so many of us find ourselves surrounded by. But like I said, after a while...

But just the ones who don't go anywhere with it.

I could. I can. And I do.

Hava Happa Buhdee!

How do we know that caffeine addiction doesn't cause coffee?

Betty Carter did a really hip version of "Social Call" (hell, it's a really hip tune period!) for her Columbia/Epic debut(?) sides. PERFECT tune for how she was singing back then.

The White Album, Abbey Road, and Let It Be are the only ones that are exactly the same. The American Sgt. Pepper lacked the thing in the runoff at the end of Side 2. Magical Mystery Tour was a full-length album in the U.S. Side 2 was recent singles. We aslo got a rather bizzare Apple album (called HEY JUDE on the spine, but THE BEATLES AGAIN on the label) between Abbey Road & Let It Be that was another singles, etc. "catch up" album. It went from "Can't Buy Me Love" to "The Ballad of Jahn and Yoko" in the course of 10 songs, with stops in between. I can't tell you if the three (only three!) albums that are identical in content have identical mixes though.

Charles Tyler is my kinda player.

What I really meant was that Ayler's music, like the Grand Canyon, is caught up in/with centuries (or more) of inexplicable natural forces. It's a bottomless pit of inexplicable mystery, yet for those to whom it speaks, it speaks deeply, perhaps at a level of "supra-consciousness". You can explain the Grand Canyon, but can you really understand it? Brotzmann's music (and this is just how it hits me), like a pothole, is very much of this world and the people who inhabit it- the pressures, absurdities, and abuses of modern life seem to me to be at the root of it, and, also like a pothole, it's deliberately "annoying" quality is precisely the point of it - it exists to get our attention, to let us know in no uncertain terms that something's wrong and desperately needs fixing. Now, when I was younger, the notion of going around looking for potholes and bringing them to everybody's attention was pretty damn appealing. But after a while (and after numerous front-end allignments and new shocks/struts), I kinda got to the point where I knew where all the potholes were, as well as knowing that as soon as you fixed one, sooner or later another one would show up, many times on the same street. Plus, I had pretty much learned all the ways to call them to people's attention. The whole pothole thing just got to be "old news", not because I no longer cared, but because, noble as the cause is, there's more to life than its absurdities. The reward was/is finite in scope, at least for me. Once you cash it in, what else is there? But the Grand Canyon, man, I could look at that thing forever and never see the same thing twice. Or possibly even once!

I'll probably blow whatever "hipness quotient" I have by saying this, but I really do feel that Ayler is to Brotzmann what the Grand Canyon is to a pothole. There - I've said it.

Ssometimes the light finds us, sometimes we find the light. Just use it, and don't worry about how you found it. Grasshopper.

The Shaw quote on PeeWee that I'm aware of is "he played better clarinet than guys who played clarinet better".

Broken hearts and shattered dreams.

For better or worse, those Capitol albums were how I came to know and love The Beatles. THE BEATLES' SECOND ALBUM was the first LP I ever bought with my own money (in MONO no less!), and, truthfully, it's as good a rock album as has ever been made, even though it wasn't really "made as an album" (ok, it's as good a poprock album as has ever been assembled...). The sequencing is impeccable,and the energy never, ever drops. Quite the rush for a kid, and still one now. This will be a nice nostalgia package if I ever get in the mood for to buy something along those lines

Ok, wasn't this Yes' "comeback" album of sorts? 1983, the industry was riding high (in a number of ways...), and MTV had just begun to be big. So I'm thinking that part of the publicity blitz behind this type of album by this type of band might include releasing in on every possible format. There might even have been an 8-track version (that's entirely a guess, though). But I'd also think that LP and casette were the only two formats that got regular distribution. Moose, do you REALLY remember being able to join the the reel-to-reel version of the Columbia Record Club as late as 1983? If so, then that might be what this is - a "record club issue". I can guarantee you that there weren't no reel-to-reel sections in the record stores in 1983! At least not anywhere I went...

Getz was a punk at one time, so hey, you're cool.

No.

Besides those being the original lyrics, I suspect it's a move to keep Mike Love totally out of this project in any way. shape, or form, seeing as how he was reputedly the most antagonistic towards it back in the day. Just a hunch.

We got a couple of pretty damn good trombonists here - Free For All (who's a regular) and slide advantage redux (who's an occasional visitor). That would be Paul McKee and Greg Waits, respectively.

"Roundabout"?

The Macero you selected is a very good one. You might even be surprised by it...

I dunno man - 1983 seems a bit late for reel-to-reel as anything other than an extreme niche market...

No, I don't really dislike him. I just don't get anything out of him other than a tremendous respect for the work that he's put in. But the results of that work don't reach me at all. I hear all this talk of him as a "leading voice", and I can only conclude that where he's leading is someplace that I'm just not interested in going. Like Eric Alexander and others, I have the highest respect for Potter's talents; he just doesn't connect with me emotionally. I know there are many for whom he does, and that's cool. Different strokes and all that. I do think that the promoting of him as the aforementioned "leading voice" is a bit much, but whatcha' gonna do 'bout that? Loads of respect, little or no real affection. I guess that sums it up for me.