GA Russell

I opened up my copy yesterday and listened to it four times. I'd like to continue to hear it for about a week before I make up my mind. It's different.

Yes, I guess that's true. The buzz on this one was along the lines of...If you liked French Connection, you'll like Seven Ups. Same director (as I recall), same actor, etc. It wasn't as good, but it wasn't bad in its own right.

Anybody ever see The Seven Ups? I enjoyed it in a theatre, but haven't seen it since. As I recall, the entire publicity was built around the car chase.

I remember seeing Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers do a song a Shindig. I liked it. I was sorry that I never saw anything of theirs in the record stores. To my knowledge they never received airplay in the US. Shortly thereafter their bass player left to join The Searchers, who IMO should also be in the HOF.

We didn't regularly watch the show, but I can remember singing along once to... When you're down and out, Lift up your head and shout. There's going to be a great day! Mitch had a peculiar way of directing. He stuck his elbows out, made fists of his hands, kept his hands close to his chest, and moved them abruptly to the beat up and down six inches.

I don't see your shooting him with your .357 listed among your options.

I have been listening to my old cassettes for the past month, and in the past week or two I have listened to a couple of Gino Vanelli albums for the first time in a number of years - Gist of the Gemini and A Pauper in Paradise. I also have his first album, which as I recall was called Crazy Life, but that's an LP which is boxed away. I think they're enjoyable enough, and for my money a lot better than most of the popular music that was being made at that time.

No one has mentioned The Dave Clark Five. I enjoyed the DC5 when I was in high school because they didn't try to sound like the Beatles. My favorite of theirs was Can't You See That She's Mine.

I'm not a participant, but as I understand it the guys doing the Blindfold Tests make CD-Rs of songs they like, mail them to each other, and challenge the recipents to guess who the artists are. If that's not right, maybe I ought to open one of those BFT threads and find out!

It appears to me that all of the participants of this thread except Alexander believe that the people here who participate in the BFTs are unethical. Am I right?

Of course! How could I have forgotten! Still same choice for me, online stores, but without doubt I got more CDs from Concord and its blowout sale than anywhere else this year - 46.

Years ago he hipped me to a cartridge that made a significant but inexpensive improvement to my turntable's performance. When I am in the market for a new system, I plan to give them every consideration.

Your Music for me.

When I joined BMG ten years ago, I studied a website which was devoted solely to the record clubs from a consumer's point of view. It said that the standard recording contract signed by the artists calls for the artist to receive one-half the usual royalty for discs sold by the record clubs, except that they were to receive no royalty for discs given free by the record clubs. I take that to mean that the artists receive one-half royalty for each Your Music sale. However, when BMG offers "Buy one, get two free, then unlimited $2.99", the artist receives one-half royalty for the discs sold at $18.99 and $2.99, but the poor guys who were arbitrarily selected to be the two free CDs don't get paid anything.

Just got this. No warning. "Thank you for keeping your Music Queue updated! Unfortunately, Kurt Rosenwinkel: Deep Song is no longer available and has been removed from your Music Queue."

Adam, the Harper, Babasin/Enevoldsen and a third were available in the Concord blowout sale. I have to think that they will be made available again after the invenotry is relocated to southern California.

I suppose it wouldn't be right for me to not fill you in. There was a beer heavily advertised on television called Busch Bavarian beer. Today it is known simply as Busch beer, and it is the sponsor of the #2 auto racing circuit in the US, sort of the minor league for the #1 circuit, which is called the Nascar Nextel Cup series.

Steve, I see that you are from "Southern Germany". That reminds me of an old joke we all loved when we were kids. What do you call a tired guy from southern Germany? A Bushed Bavarian!!! I don't expect the Europeans here to gt it, so you'll have to trust me that to a twelve year old kid that's funny.

My sister first told me about Guy Fawkes Day when we were kids, and she told me that the English were celebrating Guy Fawkes. As an adult I came to the conclusion that they were celebrating the fact that he was caught. Quite the plan. Blow up Parliament, and replace the king with a Catholic. Right up my alley!

Thanks Mark. Maybe I'll give it to my sister for Christmas. I ran out of patience waiting for an opinion because the birthday is coming up (my original order was backordered, causing a delay of a precious few days), and I ordered some Anita O'Day. My sister may like Anita OK, but I doubt that she will like her as much as she likes Linda Eder and Jane Monheit.

On Friday I ordered Janis Siegal's A Thousand Beautiful Things. Yesterday I was notified that it was on backorder. That album is on Telarc. I believe that a number of her Telarc albums have recently been removed from BMG/Your Music's list. Telarc is now owned by Concord, which has withdrawn its participation of BMG/Your Music for all of its other labels. So I cancelled the order, figuring that they are never going to get it back in, and ordered something else. If there is a Telarc you want, I suggest that you order it pronto.

I'd have first said, "There are only 98 numbers between 1 and 100."

Here's his obit from the LA Times: Red Auerbach, 89; Celtics coach built a basketball dynasty By Steve Springer, Times Staff Writer October 29, 2006 Arnold "Red" Auerbach, who built and sustained the Boston Celtics, professional basketball's greatest dynasty, through meticulous scouting, innovative coaching, cunning deal-making and fiery leadership, died Saturday, said NBA spokesman Tim Frank. He was 89. Auerbach reportedly died of a heart attack near his home in Washington, D.C. "Nobody has had as much impact on a sport as Red Auerbach had on the game of basketball. He was a pioneer of the NBA. He left his philosophy of winning championships, playing hard and playing as a team with several generations of players," former Celtics coach and player Tommy Heinsohn told the Associated Press. "He was relentless and produced the greatest basketball dynasty so far that this country has ever seen and certainly that the NBA has ever seen," Bob Cousy, the Hall of Fame guard who played for Auerbach, told the AP. A member of the Celtics organization for 55 years, Auerbach led the team to nine championships as a coach, including eight in a row, a streak unequaled by any other coach in any professional sport. Phil Jackson matched Auerbach's nine championships when the Lakers won the title in 2002. After moving full time into the front office, Auerbach went on to engineer seven more Celtics titles as the team's general manager. The team said the upcoming season would be dedicated to Auerbach. "Red had an unbelievable passion for winning," Kevin McHale, a former Celtics player, told The Times. "Second place to him was like 28th place. It made no difference." Along the way, Auerbach became the first to pick an African American player in the NBA draft (Chuck Cooper in 1950), the first to start five black players in one lineup (1964) and the first to hire a black coach in the NBA (Bill Russell in 1966). Auerbach's teams built their dynasty by consistently denying the Lakers. Eight times over a 25-year period, from 1959, when the Lakers were still based in Minneapolis, through the 1983-84 season, the Lakers and Celtics met in the NBA Finals and eight times Auerbach and the Celtics emerged victorious. Even in his declining years, Auerbach maintained his passion for the club. "The Boston Celtics are not a basketball team," he once said. "They are a way of life." His life. Arnold Jacob Auerbach was born Sept. 20, 1917, in Brooklyn, N.Y. His father, Hyman, was a Jewish immigrant from Russia who married an office clerk, Mary Thompson. Red and his brothers worked in the family's Brooklyn dry-cleaning business. Auerbach left Brooklyn for George Washington University, where he played basketball for three years and earned a bachelor's degree in education in 1940 and a master's degree in education a year later. He began his coaching career at the high school level and taught physical education and history. In 1946, Auerbach became head coach of the Washington Capitols of the Basketball Assn. of America. He spent three seasons in Washington and one coaching the Tri-Cities Blackhawks. Auerbach became head coach of the Celtics for the 1950-51 season at a salary of $10,000. Until the 1950 NBA draft, the league had left black players to the Harlem Globetrotters and their powerful owner and founder, Abe Saperstein. But once Auerbach and Celtics owner Walter Brown made the first move by choosing Cooper, the Washington Capitols chose Earl Lloyd in a later round. Lloyd became the first black to play in an NBA game, a few days before Cooper did. Coaching was just one of Auerbach's duties in an era in which teams couldn't afford a staff of assistants, scouts, conditioning coaches and a large front office. "If we had a game on a Wednesday and another on a Friday," Auerbach told The Times in 2004, "I'd have practice on Thursday morning. Then I'd get on a plane and go to a college doubleheader in New York or Philly or wherever the games were…. And then, on top of that, I'd have my former players … steer me on which players to see and which to not bother seeing." Along with a keen sense of talent and a broad network from which to glean the names of future stars, Auerbach was a master wheeler and dealer. He put together three crucial deals to first put the Celtics atop the basketball world and then to reinvent them several more times. In 1956, Auerbach acquired Russell, a center who had excelled at the University of San Francisco and on the U.S. Olympic team at the Melbourne Games, by obtaining the first-round draft pick of the St. Louis Hawks for forward Cliff Hagan and center Ed Macauley. Actually, it was more complicated than that. The Hawks had the No. 2 pick. The Rochester Royals had the first pick. So Auerbach persuaded Brown, the Celtics owner who also owned the Ice Capades, to offer several performances of the show to Lester Harrison, owner of the Royals, in exchange for Harrison's agreement not to take Russell. Auerbach got his man, and the Celtics went on to win 11 titles in 13 years with Russell at center, the last two with Russell serving as player-coach after Auerbach stepped down. The Celtics struggled through much of the 1970s, but Auerbach reinvigorated the franchise by selecting a player named Larry Bird out of Indiana State. It would have been a no-brainer to select Bird in 1979 after he had led his team to the finals of the NCAA tournament. But by then it was too late. Auerbach had gambled on Bird with the sixth pick of the 1978 NBA draft, knowing he would have to wait a year to sign the junior forward, but also knowing that it would be worth the lost year. No other team seemed to realize that Bird was eligible after having played a year at Indiana before transferring to Indiana State. Auerbach completed the front court that would prove a dominating force in the 1980s by trading his first and 13th picks in the 1981 NBA draft to the Golden State Warriors for center Robert Parish and a selection he would use to get McHale. Auerbach thought he had the core for yet another championship run when he used the second pick of the 1986 draft to select Len Bias, only to have Bias die of a cocaine overdose while celebrating his selection. Although Auerbach had a knack for identifying athletes who would become stars, he preferred role players, those who valued winning over compiling individual honors. "He was really enamored with putting players together to form a team," McHale said. "He would say, 'Wouldn't you rather play with a guy who knows how to play and will play with you than a guy who is more talented, but selfish?' " Auerbach's Celtics were known for their playmaking offense, bruising defense, relentless rebounding and the sixth man, a fresh reserve who would come off the bench to give his team a boost. Bob Cousy, Dave Cowens and John Havlicek were among those who thrived in that team environment. "We have never had the league's top scorer," Auerbach said of the Celtics' dominance. "In fact, we won seven league championships without placing even one among the league's top 10 scorers. Our pride was never rooted in statistics." One of Auerbach's players, Bill Sharman, who went on to coach the Lakers in 1971-72, their first championship season in Los Angeles, said he learned many of his techniques from Auerbach. "He would do so many things to break up the monotony of practice," Sharman told The Times. "He would match the biggest guys on the team in scrimmages with the smallest. And the losers would have to run laps, do push-ups or buy lunch." Among Auerbach's honors were the designation on the NBA's 35th anniversary team as "Greatest Coach in the History of the NBA," membership in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and awards for Coach of the Year and Executive of the Year. In 1985, on the occasion of Auerbach's 68th birthday, a life-size sculpture of him, cigar in place, was unveiled in Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace. Auerbach and his late wife of 59 years, Dorothy, had two daughters. Because one of those daughters, Randy, suffered from asthma, the family never moved to the damp climate of Boston. Instead, they stayed in Washington all the years Auerbach was with the Celtics, with Red living in a Boston hotel. In addition to his daughters, Randy Auerbach and Nancy Auerbach Collins, Auerbach is survived by a granddaughter and three great-grandchildren. Auerbach was feisty to the end. Once asked if he looked back with favor upon those Lakers teams he had battled so ferociously as a coach, he replied, "They were the enemy then and they are the enemy now."

It's time for me to give my sister a birthday present. She enjoys jazz, but is not a jazz fan like those of us here. I have given her albums by a number of female vocalists in recent years. She has preferred the young ones like Jane Monheit and even Linda Eder and Nancy LaMott. I've just about run out of people to select from at Your Music. I see that Claudia Acuna is available. I've never heard her. Does anyone have an opinion of her? I'm looking for a voice that goes down easy, not a great jazz artist. Thanks!

LOL! I like where they add extras to garnish! I think one bite of that concoction would be enough. And topping it with strawberries???