.... a Magic Carpet

I finished "Follow The Music" who's final chapter was very contrivedly 33⅓ and was wondering what to read next. I sort of wanted fiction, but something I know I'd be happy with so I have gone back to the first Clive Barker book I read, "Weaveworld", it's in a large format BCA edition with "Cabal" (which found it's way into film as "Nightbreed" , an interesting twist where the real monsters are the humans and the "monsters" are ghettoised and persecuted and features David Cronenberg acting as the major villain).

"Weaveworld" was Barker's second novel after "The Damnation Game" although he had produced "The Books of Blood" short story collection. I am currently reading "Imajica" on Kindle  (my favourite book ever) but I now know why I was hooked by "Weaveworld" , sixty pages in wit just a glimpse of the magic carpet referred to in the title and part of this is telling me "when you have read this you know you have to read the other books" so it looks like I am unlikely to be reading any more new books for a while.

I was trying to think of a song to go with this and while I could have chosen "Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf (great name from the Herman Hesse novel), "The Magic Suitcase" by Carbon/Silicon has been playing in my bed, while the subject matter is a little dodgy (the suitcase contains a bomb, I think) it's a superb song and the second best song on their brilliant debut album.

It's grey Tuesday and time for me to leave the house, but if you need some new book places to visit "Weaveworld" is a brilliant place to go.

Keep Yourself Alive

One of the things I say to people is YOU are the most important person in your life, to which people tell me I'm wrong and say it's their partner , their children or grand children. My reply is is you have to keep yourself it the best condition to be there for them, if you are not there, their lives would be missing you for love and support , so that's why you have to put yourself first.

There's a Michael Moorcock book "Breakfast In The Ruins" that finishes each chapter with an impossible "What Would You Do?" dilemma, if you follow the link you can see some of the horrible dilemmas listed, and I had misremembered one as "You and your child are taken by a group of thugs and they give you five minutes to decided who dies, you or your child" . The horrible thing with this scenario is that you know that you cannot trust these people and you are probably more able to defend yourself if you chose yourself.

So what brought this on , again it's finishing "Follow The Music" , the two artists I was waiting to be covered were Harry Chapin and Queen and the latter's first single was "Keep Yourself Alive" which impressed me no end, with the excellent guitar phasing and "No Synthesisers". I was unaware that the band were all degree educated and Freddie Mercury was classically trained. Jac Holzman love the first album but was not impressed with them when he first saw them live, so he wrote them a letter, which they took on board. He remarked how hard working they were and really the rest is history.

The thing is look after yourself because you are very important to the people in your life. I am diabetic and many people have told me they would never inject themselves, they would rather die. I said "What about your family?" and injections are just a tiny prick that you get used to. I still inject five times a day although the amount of insulin is reducing as it the weight (slowly) and I have to sort about twenty tablets a day , and while it is, at worst , a chore, I do this because I want to have a good life, and me having a good life means that everyone who I mean something to will be happy that I am.

So have a great Sunday , Storm Dennis seems to have calmed and there's not been too much damage here, which is good......

Choice

I grew up with two TV channels. When John F Kennedy was assassinated they replaced "Bonanza" with an old woman playing piano  much to my annoyance. It was either that or nothing. I probably went and played out.

It's the same with books and music, I know people who have little or no personal music or books in their lives and at some point I didn't have much.

This has come home to me using the Samsung A3 until I replace my Google Pixel. I had so much music on the Pixel that I didn't really know what to play some days. It's the same with TV channels , I have over 200 to choose from as well as on demand TV and over 400 video discs, as well as so many books I could start my own library.

Reading "Follow The Music" I decided to load the CD from it plus the five discs from "Forever Changing " in to the small SD card on the phone to listen to in sequence.  It's strange having too much choice is almost as bad as having no choice at all or a limited choice, but it's always better to have the option of too much of what you want.

But listening to these albums , I 'm not thinking of what should I listen to, I'm enjoying the six albums that I have to listen to , and means that I can appreciate them as they should be, Having said that there is some awful stuff mixed with some subliminal stuff but I am still on the early folk so we have Tim Buckley and Tom Rush mixing with people I've never heard before, but  is all great to listen to.

When I've finished these I'll replace them with another few albums. Sometimes it is good to limit your choices, but then again you want to be able to choose what you limit yourself to.

Tomorrow I have a work photography session, I offered to be in the crowd and they've asked me to run it, so that should be interesting.

So what song should we go with , it has to be one from the current album, we'll take Judy Collins' "Tomorrow Is A Long Time" which I first heard excellently covered by Rod Stewart on "Every Picture Tells A Story" and it is a wonderful song penned by Bob Dylan and covered by many.

Kontakt

I said I write about anything , and I have no writing targets, but this morning as I put in my contact lenses I was still amazed how they actually work. Today was almost seamless lenses in , one perfect vision,  in slight irritation , so took it out and put it back in. I started on contact lenses thirty years back with hard lenses, I have never felt more uncomfortable and at the same time euphoric that I could walk round and see without glasses.

Someone once said to me that I wore contact lenses out of vanity. I told them it wasn't. I have 20/20 vision with them in, they don't get wet when it rains, and don't steam up when you go from cold to warm environments.

When I moved to soft lenses (I had considered laser surgery but they told me once it was done I would have to wear glasses for reading and it would cost me two grand, slightly pointless as I didn't want to wear glasses permanently and pay for the privilege), I heard stories about people who lose them in their eyes, get them stuck to their eyes and can't get them out etc. I lost one and it reappeared about three days later and I didn't feel any irritation.

It just amazes me that I put them in and then I can see. It amazes me that they adjust to my eye and that I can then see. Who thought that instead of glasses you could stick something on your eye (a horrible thought until you actually do it and get used to it) . Apparently the idea was first mooted by Leonardo Da Vinci in 1580, but there's a fair bit about on Wikipedia here.

Also why does bad weather seem worse at night. Last night was rainy and windy but this morning seems to have quietened down. Monday night I was walking home and got hit by rain and stinging hailstones and when I looked at what was playing when I got on it was "Stormy Weather" by Echo and The Bunnymen. Last night it started snowing when I was walking back though I am now listening to the free CD that came with "Follow The Music" with 26 early Elektra folk and blues tracks some taken from vinyl. Some are embarrassingly trite but some are very good like Judy Collins cover of Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" and Phil Ochs "I Ain't Marching Anymore" which what will go with this morning , an excellent anti war anthem.

Stir Fry

Yesterday was a bit weird, we've had a bit of the latest global warming caused storm but it was fine walking into work listening to Echo and The Bunnymen's "More Songs To Learn and Sing" and with every song that came on wondering how this band were not the biggest draw in the world at some point.

At the weekend I was thinking this month I was maybe averaging one post every two days , then I realise on Sunday night I'd done seven in nine days and this will make it eight in eleven, but if I feel like writing I will do.

Walking home someone reckoned it was fine walking weather , which it was, though a bit blowy, until I got off the bus route, then the hailstones started coming down, the wind was blowing and they were cold and stinging and I had no umbrella (that would have just been destroyed by the wind) or protective headwear, but you just have to keep walking , about half a mile through an annoying hailstorm. It could have been much worse and getting into a warm house was most appreciated.

For tea I had got some prepared stir fry vegetables that implied it was hot and there was a sauce. There was no sauce so chucked the stuff (peppers , carrots, cabbage , beansprouts , water chestnuts and onions and more, in the pan with olive oil then added some brown sauce and sriracha sauce to give it some but . Five minutes later it was in the dish and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought I would need something else, but I didn't eat anything else and didn't feel hungry so that was a success and will be having more. You can see me cooking on my instagram feed here. To me it looks very tasty, and it was.

Last night the wind and rain were blowing and this morning looks grim so I'm not sure if I can walk into work (well I can but the bus option is very tempting) we shall see.

Music on this Tuesday will be "The Cutter" by Echo and The Bunnymen though any song from that album would be perfect.

Agatha Christie's Parrot

I'm sure lots of others have said it, but every time I see Agatha Christie's Poirot advertised I think Agatha Christie's Parrot. I wonder if she ever owned a parrot, not that it actually matters.

But in a fairly relaxing day among other things I have been continuing with "Follow The Music"  and after a mainly business orientated section (ie for me boring it hit me with several surprising bands and connections.

Firstly we had the MC5 , extremely revolutionary and anti corporate, with two versions of "Kick Out The Jams" one starting with the original "KOTJ MotherFvckers" and the other "family friendly "OTJ Brothers and Sisters" which caused major issues when the Hudson's Department Stores got the wrong batch causing no end of too and forth repercussions (buy or borrow the book to find out).

The there was Iggy and The Stooges as well, who lasted two albums with Elektra but another out there band who turned up to record their first album with five songs. They were sent away to get some more.

Now I was under the impression that both these bands were on CBS but that must have been the British releases. Similarly Queen were on Elektra in the USA but on EMI in the UK.

I shouldn't have been so surprised as I have a copy of the first ever (to my knowledge) rock picture disk, a German Elektra compilation called Hallucinations / Psychedelic Underground which has these bands plus The Doors and others and you can see it here.

The final and most surprising were the middle or the road AOR band Bread led by David Gates who Jac Holzman knew from his work with Captain Beefheart. I never knew that. This is why reading is such an adventure. You always find out new things.

Obviously there is a plethora of songs I could choose but as it's Sunday night before another working week we'll go with The Stooges "No Fun"

Quietjin

For some reason I either dreamed or thought that "Quietjin" was a solution to a scrabble word, but it's not , just a deactivated twitter account and there are various results from Google and DuckDuckGo and there is Quietjin1 on twitter. Quietgin was another option although Quieting is a valid word. There are some weird words or letter combination that online Scrabble allows and some oddities it does not allow. Words like XI , XU , QI , ZA , ZO which I am sure you would get questioned on in real life Scrabble.

I find Scrabble more like Tetris in that you are trying to fit words into spaces which get harder as the game progresses. It's more about observation than literacy. Anagrams are easy enough to solve, but once you have the solution you have to find somewhere on the board to fit it in. Usually when I play a word I work out what my next play will be and hope my opponent doesn't take my place.

It's similar when people say that you need to be good at maths to do Sudoku , it's just again about observation except Sudoku gets easier as you progress through the puzzle. Although generally Sudoku uses numbers you could use any symbols at all, although when you see one that doesn't use numbers you get slightly disorientated because you are used to using numbers.

I used to play with about ten people on Facebook Scrabble and that is generally the main reason I stayed on Facebook , but it's down to two of the first people I started playing with. Others have dropped off and when I have tried to start a new game  the game has not been reciprocated although according to Scrabble these folk are actually playing.

The visits to the blog have dropped significantly and it's down to a more realistic one hundred a day, though I may just hit half a million by the end of February, so that is not an impossibility, and if not February I will hit it in March.

This Sunday morning is grey and rainy, not the most inspiring, but I have lots to do today while also trying to relax before what will be a very intense week at work, but that does make the days fly by, there is nothing worse than having nothing to do, and I do love having problems to solve, hence the enjoyment of problem solving puzzles such as Scrabble and Sudoku.

So a fairly obvious song is "Games People Play" by Joe South (although it's been very widely covered) , but enjoy your Sunday everyone. The melody was appropriated by eurotrash poppers Dan The Banjo Man in the seventies (listen on th elink.

Enjoyment

The first Rod Stewart album I bought was "Every Picture Tells A Story" and that was so good I wasn't sure about the follow up. I seem to remember the album and lead single "Maggie May" both topped the American and UK charts simultaneously in the days when you had to move product to actually get a chart placing.

The follow up "Never A Dull Moment" was possibly even better with some gorgeous songs and the excellent lead single "You Wear It Well" plus many others including "True Blue", "Lost Paraguayos" and a storming take on Sam Cooke's "Twistin' The Night Away" with a cracking drum break from , I assume , Kenny Jones. The Faces were always around for the early Rod outings.

Rod Stewart is one of the all time finest interpretive singers and he could write a good song himself.

His early albums contain some great songs and covers, check out "Gasoline Alley"

For the creative finale came with "Atlantic Crossing" which was when he hit paydirt, although he has still produced the odd gem. It is quite amusing when no one knows our favourite artists and we complain because they don't get the appropriate recognition, and then when they do it hit the big time we complain that they sold out. Let's face it we all do what suits us best.

So this brief Rod Stewart appreciation is topped by "You Wear It Well" and that's for everyone that does.

Leaf Mouse

It looks like the feedburner feed has finally fizzled out two thousand visits short of half a million, c'est la vie , I 'm surprised it has gone on as long as it has. The half million will come , just not as quickly as I was expecting.

Tonight I was out walking and heard a noise near my feet and thought it was a mouse or rat. On closer inspection it was actually a leaf! I may have been influenced by the rodent I saw aon West Cliff at Whitby. Who knows what can twist and lead our minds. I also saw and disposed of a huge spider in the kitchen tonight, I've seen bigger, but not that often.

I was thinking of writing a (science) fiction story as a post with the title "The Probability Conundrum" bas on the fact that everyone expects something to happen whether it be good or bad, based on fact or heresay (or heresy ... I wonder if those two words are related) and then do those people cause the expectation to happen abdor does it just happen ... eventually, and also could people make things happen for other people if they knew someone was expecting a particular outcome.

I wasn't sure where I would go with this but there's some bits here that I may pick up on one day.

It seems the tags on posts are working again so I've added a few for this post, which I hadn't really planned to do as it is past eleven on a Friday night and also this year I don't intend to post as much.

I've also stopped posting on Mewe but maybe I will post this on there and see if visits pick up.

So a song to go with this, maybe "Science Friction" by XTC which is a song from my long ago youth, but still worth a listen. This is one of the things about getting older , your back catalogue of experiences and likings increases with everything you do , or it should, and it certainly does with me.

Ok almost time to hit dreamland and see all my friends there.

Fair To Middling

Last night I finished watching Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar", it's taken me a week to do it and I don't know what I was expecting, but when it started I thought "I thought this was film about space exploration". Well it's Christopher Nolan and is a wonderful, touching and mind bending film, yes things happen that you think that's far fetched, but when you suspend your disbelief it is an absolutely brilliant film.

I am more than half way through the Elektra story by Jac Holzman "Face The Music" and we are still following The Doors. The importance of The Doors to Elektra is emphasised by the back cover of the book that has fourteen album covers, four of which are by The Doors, other bands and artists get one. It's still interesting and readable but a lot of this I know from The John Densmore book but that's bye the bye.

I also got through a few pages of my favourite book "Imajica" on my Kindle Fire and otherwise did nothing. Is reading and watching film efficient use of my time? Who knows but it is enjoyable.

I was thinking that this was about beginnings , middles and ends but the Thousand Yard Stare song "Fair To Middling" (a phrase from my youth) came to mind, and as they are one of my favourite bands I will share that with you, although that was the name of the album so we'll go with "0-0 After Extra Time" or "No Score After Extra Time" depending on who's reporting the title, still appropriate in this FA Cup replay week.

I also want to do a Youtube video of me playing Tom Wait's "In The Neighbourhood" and "Does This Train Stop on Merseyside" by Ian Prowse / Amsterdam . I know I can't match the originals but the songs are both simple and wonderful.

Favourites

Favourites is one of those words where the American spelling misses out the "u" , like colour or neighbour . The thing is often the American spelling is more accurate than the English version, I think Aluminum / Aluminium is one such example. Anyway this is a digression.

Staying with Matt and Craig in Dillons I found that as well as their normal excellent service and welcome they'd upgraded their TV's to Smart TVs so there were lots of options to watch catch up TV (such as "The Thick of It" on BBC iPlayer from episode one which although it is only fifteen years old gets dated by the plethora of CRTs and flip phones , though the dialogue (American dialog ? ) is still sharp as ever.

Coming home I started on "Veep" another Armando Iannucci driven series as manic, sweary and brilliant as "The Thick Of It" part of the new excellent Sky Comedy channel, and followed that with a few episodes of the excellent "Miracle Workers".

The book I am reading "Follow The Music" has just covered the signing of The Doors to Elektra but the book itself is far too big to conveniently carry , so I bought a similarly sized book for my Kindle Fire "Imajica" by Clive Barker which is my favourite book of all time and was drawn into that and read twn chapters over the weekend and on the train back so that is another favourite I now have on the go (again).

Meanwhile the TIVO box is filling up with recordings and I am working my way through Christopher Nolan's excellent "Interstellar" which is rather amazing despite a lot of heartrending moments caused by the bending of time in space travel through black holes.

So today is back to work and I may walk to work although it is quite cold.

Another five thousand visits and this blog will have had half a million visitors which is a sort of milestone, although when I think I cover more than a million steps every three months that number does pale into insignificance.

So what song should I share this morning, the only band I have mentioned are the doors but I was also mentioning how technology can make film and TV look dated (but don't let that stop you watching because it is the dialogue that makes it essential viewing) so we will go with "Living In The Past" by Jethro Tull.

Lost Connection

Got to Whitby and the charging port on my Google Pixel died on me, so it was a case of slowly watching the woer drain until it died. An new port will be about sixty pounds but of course I was away in Whitby with no other form of connection to so many things. I have my Amazon Kindle but that is reliant on a wifi connection and  while there are numerous connection options it's not a phone and is hardly portable.

The cost of a refurbished Pixel 2 is only a hundred pounds more than the Pixel itself , and the reason I want to stay with the Pixel is that it keeps pace with Operating System Upgrades so my Pixel is on Android 10. I bought an old Samsung Note that could only take up to version 4 so a lot of the apps I need wouldn't work and didn't  do 4G, so went back to CEX and exchanged for a Samsung A3 which was smaller and goes up to V6 and does 4G. It's a bit smaller and slower but does the job and is a decent holding handset until I get a new on or the Pixel fixed, though a second hand Pixel with a 12 month guarantee is around £90 so not much more than getting this one fixed.

If I had been in Newcastle I'd have probably found somewhere to fix it but when you are on holiday it's a little more difficult, although life without a phone is not impossible.

So it's now finding options and finding my way back to work tomorrow.

Ezra Furman's "Lousy Connection" seems fairly appropriate don't you think for this first February post. Oh and I need to install twitter on the A3 to share this.

Length

In yesterdays post I spoke of "Revelation" being the first piece by a rock band (Love on "Da Capo") to take up a side of a vinyl album. That got me thinking of what followed from that.

Classical music seems to have often consisted of lengthy pieces in the form of symphonies , but these were usually split into movements to give orchestras and audiences a rest. Remember permanent functional recordings that could cope with that sort of length of music did not come until the vinyl album which was around the late forties early fifties , and some symphonies outlasted the realistic forty minute vinyl limitation (anything else results in groove cramming and sound degradation).

Pink Floyd took up s side of "Meddle" with "Echoes" and "Atom Heart Mother"'s title track took up the first side. Yes did the same with "Close To The Edge" and "Relayer" opened with the first side being taken up by "Gates of Delirium" .

"Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd and "Sergeant Pepper" by The Beatles were merged song cycles that had defined songs that segued into others.

Yesterday on my walk to work I listened to Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" which is just a single forty minute piece, obviously consisting of movements and it does amage me that artists can remember everything to perform these live. That was followed by "Passion Play" which was split by the silly "Hare Who Lost His Spectacles" by effectively took up a fill vinyl album.

However Tull were outdone by Mountain who on the original vinyl album of "Twin Peaks" stretched "Nantucket Sleighride" over two and a half sides even though it was only thirty minutes long, so we'll go with the studio take of that for this last post in January. It's only six minutes long and amazing song about whaling, a section of it was also used for an ITV news program "Weekend World" , and I always loved the early Mountain album covers, amazing artwork.

Revelation

On my last post I realised I'd posted 21 times this January, last January I posted 17 times and I thought if I keep this up it will be another record year. I'd worked on in my heat that 21 x 12 = 372 !! Obviously my brain wasn't functioning correctly as it often doesn't.

This is probably my last post this month and will probably resume early  next week. I am off the Whitby for the weekend staying at Dillons one of my two preferred stays in Whitby (the other being La Rosa) , Dillon is brilliant , Craig and Matt are great hosts , the rooms are great and their breakfasts are awesome. This time it's Whitby by train, I wonder if the train will make it. Last time the line was blocked at Hartlepool so a taxi was laid on that got us to Whitby 45 minutes early...... you can't do negative delay repay (smiles).

Anyway I am getting through "Follow The Music" and the Elektra label has got it's first rock acts, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Love. Love, led by the unfeasibly talented Arthur Lee, were the first band to fill a side with a single piece, the eighteen minute "Revelation" on "Da Capo", their second album which you can listen to by clicking on the title link. It starts off with cod harpsichord  before reverting to more standard 4/4 pop rock progressing / descending into a jam, though more than listenable , owing a lot to long blues jams.

Love covered "Hey Joe" and the Bacharach / David song "My Little Red Book" book I'm going to share "Alone Again Or" with it's amazing brass arrangement and trumpet solo. It was also well covered by the Damned which you can hear here.

Archimedes' Devil

A quarter of the way through "Follow The Music" and it mentions that Jac Holzman had a desk toy called an Archimedes Devil. I'd never heard of these and couldn't really find anything on the web until I came across the Cartesian Diver or Cartesian Devil a classic science experiment which demonstrates the principle of buoyancy (Archimedes' principle) and the ideal gas law. So now I know what it is and I have seen them in the past, but this is another reason why it is great to read because it either brings back things you've forgotten or lets you discover new things.

I'm still not up to the introduction of rock music to Elektra (though the book's cover has about four Doors albums and The Beatles have been mentioned) but several unexpected names have popped up, one of which was Joshua Rifkin a player with the Even Dozen Jug Band (I really need to look into what a Jug Band is (A group that uses unconventional or improvised instruments, such as jugs, kazoos, and washboards.)  DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia are a great reference library.

But it a semi parallel with Brian Eno's Obscure imprint , Jac Holzman came up with the idea of a budget Classical label selling good quality albums for $2.50 undercutting major labels, and Rifkin was a musicologist who wrote the sleeve notes, The label is Nonesuch ,and I first came across this and Joshua Rifkin when he covered some Scott Joplin ragtime and his version of "The Entertainer" was what brought ragtime to my attention, Marvin Hamlisch covered it for the theme for the film "The Sting" , so that's what we go with today for your enjoyment.

Repetition

I heard some of the new Ed O' Brien (Radiohead) album and remember Thom Yorke saying they were dispensing with melody. Essentially music should contain some sort of recognisable pattern which may or may not be defined as melody.

Then I started thinking (and I have probably written about this before so I am repeating myself) that all songs and musical pieces are generally based on repetition , often starting with a drum beat or a rhythm in one form or another and then built up from there.

Obviously there is music that maybe doesn't have a beat as such (say in acapella) but there is recognisable repetition.

For a piece to not repeat and still be recognisable it needs to be very short, and often you will get bits in songs that do that, but repetition is essential to the actual production of a song or musical piece.

Ironically prose and film has to generally avoid repetition except in cases such as the two excellent Duncan Jones (David Bowie's lad) films "Moon" and "Source Code" where repetition is essential to the excellently executed storylines.

Life is full of repetition we sleep , wake eat , work then repeat. When we eat we have to wash and dry utensils and then repeat, same with clothes , we wear , wash  then wear in a never ending cycle which is not necessarily a bad thing , life is cyclical.

Yes it's a short Saturday morning post , and there is only one song for this , "Repetition" by The Fall.

Missing Targets

I was hoping for the blog to hit half a million visits by the end of January but with eight days to go and 21K short I think it will happen in the first week in February. January's step count is back to normal with 51K to do in eight days so that is fairly easy, and in theory I could do it in one day but that would mean walking over twenty miles and I'm far too lazy to do that.

My Christopher Lee slideshow video has passed 40K visits which is impressive when you consider the a hundred visits is considered a success for me. The Dr Seuss / Nick Cave Red Right Hand one is up to 5.6K (the first one I did hit 16K but new images became available so I extended it). Given "Red Right Hand"'s use in "Peaky Blinders" and the fact that it was the first ever non commissioned piece of music used it the "X Files".

I'm only a tenth of the way through "Follow The Music" but it is enjoyable finding out about recording , distribution and Jac Holzman's unimpressive attitude to women in the fifties, plus dealing with blacklisting during the McCarthyist Witch Hunts  is all very illuminating and interesting and I may have up to ten weeks of this, which is not a bad thing.

I am almost impressed with myself that I have written a decent length blog post with absolutely nothing to to say, just plucking the odd things out of the air to put down and share with you.

So the last thing on this Friday morning is to share the "Red Right Hand" video for you with excellent graphics by the brilliant Dr Faustus. , Oh here's a thing, because I've been writing this I've completely forgotten to take my tablets!!

Cars Hiss By My Window

This is basically my start to the days, around 4:30 - 5 am I start hearing cars on the road, then about 5:30 I hear the Central Heating Boiler (serviced today by my friend Harry Willis) start up , then at 5:45 my alarm goes off, which I turn off immediately then stretch to wake my body up before going to the bathroom to shave and clean my teeth, followed by a shower. That's my normal start to the day except today I heard a car and then the alarm went off, meaning I sort of had to get up immediately, with Harry coming to service the boiler at eight.
The "Follow The Music" book is very similar to "On Some Faraway Beach" , a lot of text, but very interesting and is going to be a long and interesting ride, about the history of Elektra records as well as the history of recording media and lots of other things including interviews with the artists involved and Jac Holzman's first record shop "The Record Loft" (it wasn't a loft but he thought it sounded folky.

The title of the post is another song from "LA Woman" one of my eldest daughter's favourite Doors albums so we will use that for this post methinks.