Keep Taking The Tablets

About a year ago I bought a scribbling tablet, sort of an electronic chalk board. At first I was disappointed because I couldn't easily make out what I was writing. I then decided to bring it into work and offer it to my manager for her children to play with.

Then, with the brighter light, I realised that it was a lot more readable and became useful for jotting down useful ideas or notes which once I'd finished with I could dispense with. Usually I used to do this with post it notes or note pads and pens. This means that I am not wasting paper, however little it might me.

These are cheap , fit in a handbag or briefcase, and if you need to keep what you have you can always photograph it. I#ve noticed that some do colour as well so that could be very useful, and yes the kids could be kept occupied with this while expressing their artistic talent.

I know this is not a usual post from me but I suppose it is vaguely in the realms of technology, but these things are genuinely useful.

I wasn't sure how I could fit music into this, then i found this Etch-A-Sketch sketching of Ray Charles soundtracked by his take on "America The Beautiful" . I could never do anything with Etch-A-Sketch which shows how clever and impressive this guys efforts are... the tablets are far easier to draw on.

The Best Record Ever?

We are always seeing polls about the greatest record, album , song , gig ever and people often ask me what was my favourite bit of some performance. My answer is almost always that I can't give an answer. I have a lot of  artists that I like and a lot of albums that I enjoy listening to over and over again but I am always open to new ideas. Having said that if you were to posit that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was the finest piece every written I wouldn't argue against that.

I'm a great fan of Bob Dylan , Van Morrison , Tom Waits , Nick Drake and then I like Yes , Pink Floyd , Pop Will Eat Itself and Genesis . The list is very very long. I love Jimi Hendrix's "Electric Ladyland" but while probably "1983" is my favourite song , his take on "All Along The Watchtower" would be my favourite single of choice because it combines Hendrix's voice and playing with some excellent Dylan lyrics. The thing is "Elect Ladyland"'s predecessors are both amazing albums as well.

So I've hardly started and there is so much I could say. My favourite album of all time is Spirit's "Future Games" followed by "El Dorado" by the Electric Light Orchestra. "Future" Games" also contains a Spirit take on "All Along The Watchtower".

Going back to Dylan maybe "Lily,Rosemary and The Jack of Hearts" is by favourite song and is from "Blood on the Tracks" but then songs like "Desolation Row" and "Tempest" are wonderful (and long) songs.

I am also a fan of keeping it simple, and while it's amazing to play a million notes a second, if you can make one note interesting, then that is true genius. The Coasters' "I'm A Hog For You Baby" and "Tommy Gun" by The Clash both contain one note guitar solos. Added to this songs that just contain one or two chords mean that anyone can play them m Van Morrison wrote "Gloria" and Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner" gets away with two chords.

I was writing this as an excuse to share The Avalanches "Frontier Psychiatrist" a totally dumbfounding patchwork of samples that solicitors gave up trying to sue for. Is is comedy ? Is it pop? I haven't a clue but it sounds amazing and the video is wonderful too, another example of musical genius and while it is a favourite of mine I really still can't tell you what my favourite is.

Aqualung

Still on a Jethro Tull kick and decided to spin "Aqualung" on yesterday's walk to work. Aqualung is a fine album and full of great songs about Ian Anderson's attitudes to religion and God and obviously he's not too impressed.

The album is great and then gets blown apart by the standout song "Locomotive Breath", which starts out with a piece of more than acceptable lounge piano  before drifting into a little more upbeat driving piano before stopping and hitting you fair and square with that monster three chord riff, as potent as anything you will ever hear. It is so good that it just put's the rest of the album in the shade.

The thing is "Wond'ring Aloud", "Wind Up" and the sinister title track (I'm sure the red tops would have an obnoxious field day if the knew about the second line of that song). It is a great album though, but in my opinion only betterd by "Thick as a Brick" and "Passion Play", but does bear lots of repeated listening.

It seems that Google are ditching Google+ and this combined with Facebook's suppressions means that each post in this blog barely hits double figures for visits and reads, but as I have said this is for me and if others find it interesting then that is good.

We're in a 28 day February which means and increase in the number of steps I have to take to hit my monthly 340K steps, but I did it last year and this year shouldn't be a problem either.

It is Friday which is good, and I will share you the Fargo into that uses "Locomotive Breath" to stunning effect., but get yourself a copy of the album if you don't already have it.

When You're Thick .... As A Brick

One of the problems with a  great deal of "progressive" music is that often the pieces stretched out for sometimes mind numbing length with obvious classical pretentions, although ironically the collections of songs together often created a uniform thematic piece thin "Wee Small Hours" by Frank Sinatra, "Tommy" and "Quadrophenia" by The Who and "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd weren't averse to stretching out musical pieces to twenty minutes ( a side of vinyl) and I remeber Mountain stretching out "Nantucket Sleighride" over two sides of "Twin Peaks" one of their live excursions.

The seventies punk movement was a kick against this, but even these bands eventually got hit by self indulgence and some songs definitely strayed past the ideal 2'59" limit, which is not always a bad thing. I love the Ramones, Garage Punk (about my musical level) but I also like a lot of progressive music often just thinking I will never ever be able to play that.

My favourite pair of Jethro Tull albums are "Thick as a Brick" and "A Passion Play" and today I was listening to the former as I walked into work. You can hear and understand every word Ian Anderson and teh band sing, often a criticism by "adults" that "you can't hear what they're saying", and for me the music holds my attention throughout the forty or so minutes you are listening. It brings in many moods from acoustic pastoral to agreesive jazz spliced rock and keeps you on board for the whole ride. At no point to do you want to leave. Dance music it is not but would have filled any seventies mosh pit.

I must say it does actually make a walk go musch faster when you are listening to great music. Although Ian Anderson has apologised for it, "A Passion Play" is very close to "Thick as a Brick" and is another album I have been listening to quite a lot recently.

Basically good music i good music and it is stupid to limit your listening because you don't approve of a particular genre. It may be just that my taste is unusually eclectic that I do enjoy album length pieces but The Buzzcocks "Love You More" was only 1'30" on it's original release and that is just just as good as "Thick as a Brick" and both are in my collection.

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.

Shadow Spider

I don't know if it's getting older but I seem to misread a lot of notices and signs. One interpretation is that I'm losing it, the other is that my perception is getting sharper because I am noticing it. The title of the post is from a misreading of a book title on Facebbok.

There's a card at work that says "Thanks" but the "Th" looks like a "W" to me. Maybe that's just my dirty mind.

I once saw a "Go Ahead Northern" sign and read it as Gonorrhea, again some indication of the workings of my mind. The thing is I realise my mistake immediatly and just see it as funny. In a way it is enriching my life with extra (if mistaken) language and words. I suppose Shakespeare must have used this and played with it, although I find some of his plays (especially "Romeo and Juliet") far too wordy.

Sometimes it's a visual thing so you get the words with LI in that look rude such as FLICK and CLINT which seen in the wrong light can cause a little consternation.

Carry On Films also exist for innuendo and mistaken meanings although barring "Carry On Cleo", "Carry On Up The Khyber" and "Carry on Screaming" most of them fall flat for me.

I am just going to put a list of my mistaken reads here which I may update as I find more. It's a bit
like the Clint chocolate cake:

• "Go Ahead Northern"  -   Gonorrhea
• "Thanks" - W@nks
• "Clint" - C*nt
• "Give The Gift of Cinema" - read Cinema as Enema (Seen in Tesco)
• 
  

So what song should go with this, sometng literary and wordy, although all songs contain words, and there are so many songs that have mis heard lyrics such as "Kiss The Sky / Kiss This Guy" from "Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix. Although I've used it before I've going to go with "Wrong" by Archers of Loaf one of my favourite ever tunes which I first heard on "The Speed of Cattle" and perfect for me contiually getting words and phrases wrong.

1812

This is post number 1812 and as such need to ibnclude the "1812 Overture (with Cannons)" by Tchaikovsky. Interestingly "Night of Fear" by The Move was based on the main "1812 Overture" riff.

It's almost a week since my last post and one of my #August50 posts came up in my feed where I did mange to post over 50 times in August 2018. I don't expect to do that this year, although I once saw a blog that had thousands on one line link posts each day. I am not too sure of what the point of that was.

I'm just back from another weekend in Whitby managing to scoff lots of fish and chips at the Magpie Cafe and picked up a pristine copy of Can's "Tago Mago" from the MIND charity shop. he album was also inspired by the occultist Aleister Crowley, which is reflected through the dark sound of the album as well as being named after Illa de Tagomago, an island which features in the Crowley legen, which was a surpise to me.

I was once listening to a compilation CD curated by John Lydon and walked in and was listening to something which I though was maybe a remix of The Stone Roses "Fool's Gold" , but it was, in fact "Halleluiah" by Can. I have seen numerous spellings but that's what it is on the vinyl album. I do have it on CD as well (40th Anniversary) but the vinyl copy is something well worth having, and, as I said, was a charity shop bargain.

There are a few places in Whitby to pick up Vinyl such as The Whitby Bookshop, but most places are aware of their worth.

So this is my first post in February, and we shall see how many I do this month. It's really just about noticing things and being bothered to write things down.