Violency - #Oktoberfest #13 - White Lightning - Big Bopper

I was walking past a King Koby Barber Shop called "Brotherhood of Defiance" which had a load of baseball bats hanging on the wall, and I don't think they were there as sports items and I got thinking how we enjoy violence and violent characters in entertainment, but how close does that come to spilling into normal life. We see toys of Negan's Lucille (a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire) and how many guns , knives , machetes and chainsaws especially around Halloween. As a child I had loads of toy weapons and I've not become a murderer so maybe I am just getting a bit unnecessarily perturbed, and I suppose the toy "Lucille" the most worrying because  I wondered if it could be used and it would be very easy to make one. That was still one of the most traumatic scenes in "The Walking Dead" which I have finally decided to call time on.

BB King's guitar was called Lucille but that is a completely different story.

For the #Oktoberfest I am running low on potential drink songs but will go with the excellent Big Bopper cover of George Jones' "White Lightning". The Big Bopper (JP Richardson) was killed with Buddy Holly and Richie Valens when their plane went down in Iowa..

#AprilSongs #29 Blue Monday

This is the second "Blue Monday" I've included in the #AprilSongs sequence the other was Buddy Holly's cover of the Fats Domino Song (written by Dave Bartholomew) , I wasn't going to include the New Order song because for many people you say "Blue Monday" and it is synonymous with the Manchester band, but the rhythm was set by the drum machine malfunctioning and that reminded me of other instances of musical instrument malfunction.

Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come were one of the first bands to use a drum machine in a live environment but at one gig their Bentley Rhythm Ace went on a twenty minute uncontrolled drum solo, usually the realm of bloat rock drummers.

When Giorgio Moroder was putting together Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" something happened with the synthesiser / sequencer and resulting in a faint echo doubling of the notes giving it it's unique sound and probably helping become the iconic dance hit that it was and is.

So this is the penultimate #AprilSongs post focussing on mistakes that have resulted in some great music, enjoy your Monday.

Older Than The Internet

Today is the thirtieth anniversary or the World Wide Web as we know it, and it came into my head that my two wonderful daughters are both older than the Internet, which obviously means that I am as well by another twenty five or so years. I was born just as rock and roll really hit with Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry.

A  definition of the Internet comes from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C):

"The World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge."

Tim Berners-Lee came up with the protocol for accessing the Internet as we do today and can be read about via the W3C link above. This is a development of Arpanet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network developed by the US Defence Department), and had been put forward by many artists and science fiction writers.

The Who's "Lifehouse" project (which was scrapped and salvaged as "Who's Next") posited a population connected by "The Grid" so in some ways this was an inevitable development, and now we are are connected by mobile devices and computers and smart devices.

People install "smart devices" in their home such as Amazon's Alexa , but that is a step too far for me even though I have a Kindle that has Alexa on it, although it has never been able to answer a question that I have asked it and cannot play my music, apparently only able to access Spotify playlists, and I don't touch Spotify.

I wasn't going to write anything until I saw the anniversary on Google, so I am going include a Chuck Berry song performed by Buddy Holly which you can listen to and watch thanks to Tim Berners-Lee's development of the US Defence Department's prototype.

Have a great Tuesday.

Smokey Joe's

I was in town and passed Smokey Joe's and thought of the Coasters' (also known as The Robins) "Smokey Joe's Cafe" and when I was looking for the song on youtube found there was a musical of the same name celebrating the songs of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller which I have shared below. Not all the songs are to my taste but it does illustrate their impressive song repertoire. It is just song after song with dance routines and is very slick and impressive.

I really just wanted to include The Coaster's take on "Smokey Joe's Cafe" which was also covered by Buddy Holly for some reason, but that's what happen's with good songs, and Holly also did the definitive version of Chuck Berry's "Brown Eyed Handsome Man". Oh and Paolo Nutini does a fairly decent take on it.

See how mind works, it starts with a single idea then I start of picking up other tangents, though getting from The Coasters to Chuck Berry via Buddy Holly is not necessarily that far of a detour and it is definitely a pleasant one.

The video below is playing and I am mightily impressed with the song "Keep On Rollin'" which I have never heard before., then it segue's into "Searchin'" absolute genius.

So I was only going to mention Smokey Joes , but watch the musical, it is mightily impressive.

Quantum

I was going to initial just write about dipping into the Bruce Springsteen "Complete 1978 Radio Broadcasts" 15 CD box set but this morning I read a bit more of "The Code Book" by Simon Singh and it has wandered into quantum theory.

Someone said about quantum theory, if you your mind is not bent and you are not confused by it then you don't get it. Well my mind is still bent and confused by it and I still feel that I don't get it. Taking into account possible simultaneous states of quasi matter and the concepts of multiverses and things be the same and the opposite of themselves my mind is a little twisted to say the least.

It's come up because of the concept of quantum computers, which if implemented will wipe the floor with current computers and effectively destroy the sort of digital privacy we currently have, which is based on  DES and  RSA encoding (I won't explain as it doesn't matter). To combat this cryptographers are working on quantum codes and cyphers but as yet do not have quantum computers to actually implement these concepts.

Anyway back to Bruce Springsteen and I listened to the first album and it's just a feed from a radio broadcast so it's like a bootleg and the crowd are fairly prominent but it is a wonderful experience. The opener of Buddy Holly's "Rave On" for me doesn't really work, but by the time you hit the closer of "Thunder Road" you are totally immersed. Absolutely wonderful. I now am looking at another fourteen discs which I am sure will be just as excellent.

Have a great Thursday everybody.

Going American

I'm just loading up my phone with a lots of sixties and seventies American music. Although to me they are major players , the only ones you may have heard of are The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Of couse that atter leads off to Paul Kantner and Grace Slick and the wonderful Hot Tuna featuring the amazing guitar of Jorma Kaukonen , who I saw at Knebworth in about '76 when The Rolling Stones headlined , 10CC had a three hour soundcheck, Todd Rundgren's Utopia went over the top with their pyramid and Lynyrd Skynyrd played one of their last gigs before we lost most of them.

I'm also loading up Tom Rapp , Pearls Before Swine and Dave Ackles , all class acts though seriously forgotten these days, but I will be pushing them over the coming weeks as I visit them on my walk to work. I don't think I've name checked so many bands and musicians in a post before, although I probably have.

I leave you with Hot Tuna's excellent cover of Buddy Holly's "It's So Easy" . Enjoy. It's time for bed for me.

Surely The Grim Reaper's Scythe Must Be Blunt Now

It's Christmas night and another one has gone. It's pointless me naming names, you know who I am talking about.

As we get older we are going to experience more people leaving this mortal coil, but 2016 seems to have been non stop. There isn't much we can do about it , every one still comes as a shock. Some of these people are relatively young too. OK there may have done drugs, alcohol and tobacco but  usually they have a fitness regime that counteracts it.

People will leave us in 2017 but I hope it is not the reaping that 2016 has been. When Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and The Big Bopper died they were all under 22 and Eddie Cochran released a song called "Three Stars" not realising that Cochran himself would be soon joining them. I know this is a short post but I will leave the Eddie Cochran song as a tribute.

Goodnight my friends

Slippin' And A Slidin' into Leningrad

Well looks like winter is coming. I was coming home tonight, cars were frosted up and the footpaths had a layer of frost and were , in parts very slippy. Had been out to The Strawberry and caught up with a lot of friends before getting a taxi home via ABC .

So this is just a short post before I go to bed as the frost bites outside.

The eponymous video is by may favourite Finnish Rock band , the wonderful Leningrad Cowboys featuring Maya Paakari. I was going to go for the Little Richard original or maybe the John Lennon or Buddy Holly cover but you can't knock back the Leningrad Cowboys. Brilliant stuff. Have a brilliant weekend , really pleased at discovering this!!

Three Score years And Ten

Not long ago that was a man's expiry date on this earth , with ladies getting a few years more. It doesn't seem two minutes since I was watchi Roger Daltrey sing "I hope I die before I get old" on Top of The Pops , I was about seven at the time a tenth of the way there!!. Also remember at that time think how old my uncle was when he started his first job at sixteen!!!

I think Datltrey's sentiment still applies , but the context has altered subtly. There's nothing we can do about physical ageing , but we should look after ourself and keep aftive and stimulated , so we can effectively stay younger longer. I know people in their nineties who live full and active lives , and I see people in their teens who have reach "old" decades before they should have.

This week Buddy Holly would have been 75 , Paul Simon at 70 is touring his new album , Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones and what's left of the Who are still performing , the Stones to ever increasing crowds in places like Rio De Janeiro.

Eventually we've all got to go , but we can have a hell of a time while we're here , and it doesnt matter what Richard Dawkins or the Pope tell you there no one on this Earth knows what happens when we shuffle of this mortal coil . So enjoy the party while you can , it can be fun!!