Since it's Jackie DeShannon's birthday:

Well, that and parking spaces.

Aimee Deep, otherwise known as the MusicPundit, obviously has an axe to grind, but she grinds it so well:

The Intellectual Property Police are nothing if not persistent. And she knows it.

A couple of months ago, I mentioned the legal wrangling between British composer Mike Batt and the estate of American composer John Cage, over a Batt composition called A One Minute Silence which Cage's lawyers claimed was a ripoff of the 1952 Cage work 4'33". And a short ripoff at that, I suppose.

The warring parties have now reached a settlement: Batt will pay a sum somewhere in six figures (sterling? dollars? euros?) to the Cage trust, and his recording will be released, with composer credit reading "Batt/Cage".

(Muchas gracias: Andy at The World Wide Rant.)

Jason White wrote a song called "Red Rag Top", and Tim McGraw cut it for his upcoming album; it's out now as a single, and it's getting some radio airplay, though some stations are distinctly uncomfortable with it, for lyrics like this:

Later, when they're not so young and wild:

It's not too hard to see how this might make some people squirm.

Of course, there's as much in between the lines as there is within them. It's possible, for instance, to see the latter-day narrator struggling with this "waste of time" stuff while suspecting that he doesn't really believe a word of it; the mere fact that it's being mentioned at all shows clearly that what happened back then is still on his mind after all these years.

Some may see this as encouraging the termination of pregnancies. I'm not buying it. "See? Just go to the clinic, write the check, and all you have to do is remember what you've done for the rest of your life." Yeah, that should encourage 'em, all right. "Red Rag Top" is no more an endorsement of abortion than "Big Bad John" is an endorsement of mine accidents. If your local country station won't play it, that's fine with me — they shouldn't have to if they don't want to — but let's not turn this into the flip side of "Papa Don't Preach".

We all have had the experience of tunes running through our heads, and often as not they won't go away without serious distraction. This morning, despite being tuned to NPR's Morning Edition, I kept bopping to the proto-metal grunt of Mountain's 1970 single "Mississippi Queen". It was over in two and a half minutes, and suddenly there was my distraction: Whatever happened to the two-minute pop tune?

Works in the classical tradition, I assume, run just about as long as the composer had something to say, subject to minor timing variations by performers. (And sometimes not so minor: I have two recordings of Ravel's Boléro, one running twelve minutes and change, the other pushing past the 17-minute mark.) Some pieces have repeats which may or not be observed — the second movement of Beethoven's 9th comes to mind — but by and large, classical works are presumed to have artistic reasons for their length. Popular singles, on the other hand, have grown from a shade over two minutes when I was younger to twice that today, and surely it's not because contemporary songwriters have more to say. (Yeah, I know, "Who wears short shorts? We wear short shorts" isn't exactly Gershwin.) In 1964, legend has it that Phil Spector, worried about getting airplay for the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'", which ran 3:50, deliberately ordered a misprint on the labels of DJ copies of the single, claiming a more reasonable 3:05. It's impossible to imagine something like that happening today. And a brisk little 1965 number like Marianne Faithfull's "Summer Nights", which runs about 1:44 (the label says 1:50), would never fit into today's "extended music sets" on the radio.

Were I really disturbed by this, I would blame Paul McCartney, who conceived "Hey Jude" as a three-minute song with a four-minute fade. Then again, I don't know anyone over the age of ten who doesn't sing along with at least some part of that fade, so Sir Paul apparently knew what he was doing.

A chunk of this weekend was spent rediscovering the band known as Chicago. I had, of course, grabbed their early LPs when they first appeared, and when Columbia Records decided that the take would be better if they pitched the act as a singles band, I started picking up the 45s. It's been about a decade since Chicago made any serious Top 40 noise, but they're still touring and releasing the occasional numbered album. (The recent two-CD Very Best issue from Rhino, Only the Beginning, can be considered Chicago XXVII.)

I ran through much of the band's Web site, and while it suffers from a bit much IEcentricity, it's one of the better band sites out there, and the history section — over a dozen pages, as befits a band in existence for 35 years — is a model of its kind. I did find myself wishing for a separate FAQ file with about, oh, 67 or 68 questions, though two of the three which immediately occurred to me were answered in the history section.

It was Nick Fasciano, I learned, who designed the Chicago logo, which appears on every album and which was once beautifully parodied by Ed Thrasher for Warner Bros.

The second question I had seen answered elsewhere, but it seemed logical that it should be discussed on the band site. Robert Lamm, who wrote the song, explains the meaning of "25 or 6 to 4": "It's just a reference to the time of day. The song is about writing a song. It's nothing mystical." And at 3:35 (or 3:34) am, well, waiting for the break of day makes perfect sense, especially if you can't sleep.

Then again, does anybody really know what time it is?

Paul McCartney showed up last night at the Ford Center, the first-ever appearance of any Beatle in the Sooner State. I didn't go, reasoning that I had probably better things to do with $250 — or perhaps rationalizing my failure to pay attention to the ticket-sale schedule — but by all accounts a splendid time was guaranteed for all.

And a tip of the fedora to Gene Triplett (and if it wasn't Gene, it was Sandi Davis — gad, how I hate shared bylines) of The Daily Oklahoman, who quipped: "If they love him this much at 60, he has nothing to worry about four years down the road." Vera, Chuck and Dave are no doubt very much relieved.

DragonAttack (who, despite anything I might have implied elsewhere, is a person of the female persuasion) explains why Bowie's Ziggy Stardust still matters after all these years. (Hint: It's one hell of a good rock and roll album.)

My favorite record-label executive, (retired) Warner Bros. VP Stan Cornyn, describing what he left behind:

I'm reading Cornyn's book, Exploding: The Highs, Hits, Hype, Heroes, and Hustlers of the Warner Music Group, written with Paul Scanlon, and while I knew quite a bit of the backstory, there are still shockers scattered among the pages.

Actually, it was imperative that I read Exploding: if ever there was anyone's writing style I wanted to absorb and reuse, it was Stan Cornyn's, the inevitable result of reading dozens of Warner Bros. and Reprise LP liner notes over the years. (Besides, he sat still for an email interview when I was putting together my guide to the Warner/Reprise Loss Leaders, which surely required patience worthy of canonization.) An example of Stantalizing prose, from Harpers Bizarre's Anything Goes (Warner Bros. WS 1716):

I go on like that sometimes, or so I think.

Richard Harris, I suspect, will be remembered mostly for his acting, but to me, he'll always be the raspy not-quite-a-singer-but-what-the hell voice of Jimmy Webb on some late-Sixties records that were so far over the top you could intercept lightning bolts on the way up.

The archetype, of course, is the seven-minute-plus "MacArthur Park", in which Harris' voice sounds like W. H. Auden's face, "like a wedding-cake left in the rain." But this soggy saga is only the beginning: "The Yard Went On Forever", a song about heroes and Hiroshima that has the audacity to incorporate a children's chorus singing De profundis, leaves the "Park" in a cloud of dust. With examples like these to guide him, Harris began to write, and his best-known composition, the spoken-word "There Are Too Many Saviours On My Cross", alternates between absolutely stunning and positively cringe-inducing, though the hair still stands up on the back of my neck on the last line:

There will be another song for him; someone will sing it.

Dear Faith:

I may be the only person in the Western Hemisphere who found little inspiration in "This Kiss", though admittedly it was one of the few songs to which I danced at my son's wedding reception, and frankly, I turned the sound down to watch the "Breathe" video. But I'm a forgiving soul by nature (please ignore those muted guffaws in the background), and when CMT decided to run the "Cry" video at the exact moment I was trying to learn all the weird control facilities on this new Sony set, I wound up darn near dropping the remote. And it's not every day I'm transfixed by something I see on CMT, believe me.

So this afternoon I spent fifteen bucks on the Cry CD — or "Enhanced CD", as it says on the back. And I'm glad I did. There are, I understand, people out there who take exception to the songs you sing and the orchestration in which they're wrapped, and to some extent I understand that, but country music has always been somewhat insular, and performers who build up a reputation outside the genre have almost always been resented. If Cry had been your first album instead of — what is this, your fifth? — Music Row wouldn't be able to deal at all with this odd admixture of Patsy Cline and REO Speedwagon. But if Cry isn't all that country, it's a fine collection, and if it's indifferent to music-industry pigeonholing, well, so am I.

I promised myself when I started this that I wouldn't say anything about how you look, and I won't. But I must say something about your Official Web Site: "You're FLASH is up to date" is no way to open up a start page. This was probably written by the same character who noted in the News section that your "hotest" new looks are complemented by "jewlery". At least they didn't let him loose on the "Enhanced" computer stuff on the CD.

Love and rockets,

Chaz

After forty years, the Seekers, a major pop group in Australia who enjoyed some big hits in the States as well, are packing it in, and all their intellectual property — song copyrights, film footage, even the group name — will be sold at auction. The official story is that they're ready to retire, but it's hinted that after four decades, they're rather sick of one another. I can certainly relate to that: after almost five decades, I'm rather sick of me.

As for the New Seekers, formed by Seekers guitarist Keith Potger around 1969, they've long since disbanded. Eve Graham wasn't quite the singer Judith Durham was, but she was utterly charming on what I thought was their best record, a remake of the Move single "Tonight".

Michael of 2 Blowhards, having been exposed to Christina Aguilera's "Dirrty" (the extra R is for extra raunch, I suppose), wonders, quite reasonably:

Which, says Chris Willman of Entertainment Weekly in his print review of Faith Hill's Cry (a collection viewed favorably at this site), was the 1980s:

But Willman is grumbling about the torturing of melody, not its complete and utter absence, so while the time-frame seems to fit, there's something else at work here, and I think it's that anyone with a hundred bucks' worth of electronic gizmos and a rhyming dictionary seems to be racing to cash in on hip-hop while it's still commercially viable — and while our soi-disant culture mavens are still willing to pretend that it's the Authentic Voice of the African-American Street instead of a substitute for that old suburban mainstay, the garage band. Some great music has come from garages, and undoubtedly there will be some raps that stand the test of time, but music historians of future centuries, I suspect, will consider both these genres mere footnotes.

Anthony James "Lonnie" Donegan, the king of British skiffle, has died at the age of 71. He first hit big in 1956 with a version of "Rock Island Line", but he is best remembered in this country for the transcendent "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor On The Bedpost Overnight", recorded in 1958 but which somehow took three years to chart (as Dot 15911), peaking at #5 in the fall of 1961, and leaving one further question unanswered:

"If tin whistles are made of tin, what do they make foghorns out of?"

He'd sing another chorus, but he hasn't got the time....

Johnny Griffith, piano and organ mainstay of the Motown "Funk Brothers" house band, has died — ironically, right before the Detroit premiere of the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown, a history of the musicians who made what Berry Gordy Jr. called "The Sound of Young America".

Griffith played on literally hundreds of sides, from pure pop (the Supremes' "Stop! in the Name of Love") to gritty soul (Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine") to gutbucket funk (Jr. Walker's "Shotgun"). To Berry Gordy's dismay, the band would occasionally do outside sessions, which is how Griffith became the king of the Capitols' "Cool Jerk" and practically a second voice on Barbara Acklin's "Am I the Same Girl" (then a first voice, as the backing track became a bigger hit, as "Soulful Strut" by Young-Holt Unlimited).

Johnny Griffith lived 68 (some sources say 66) years. Some of the records on which he played just might go on forever.

The chief RockSnob, DragonAttack, with the able assistance of the Aspiring Pirate, has charted for your delectation forty-five (of course, it had to be 45) songs with parentheses in their titles — something to peruse the next time you feel like a bullet (in the gun of Robert Ford).

On the 8th of October, I said a few things about Tim McGraw's recording "Red Rag Top", chief among which was a statement to the effect that it was not, in my view, an endorsement of abortion.

In a comment to that post today, a reader from the "100% pro-life" camp amplified this statement, and this was the clincher:

In response, I suggested (perhaps feebly) that it might not have been her idea in the first place.

I don't think this topic is quite dead yet, so feel free to weigh in, either here on on the original posting.

Jesse Walker, at long last, has seen a Dylan concert, and one thing perplexed him: the emcee's intro, which went something like this:

Walker wonders, not unreasonably:

I'd like to think #2, but I'm fairly certain it wasn't #1 either. For some reason, Dylan seems to invite this sort of drivel; the fawning tripe Pete Hamill wrote for the Blood on the Tracks liner is the archetype.

And Walker reports that he'd thought briefly about yelling "Judas!" during the set, which, were I in charge of the accounting, would earn him lots of extra karma points.

I really, really wanted to hate Shania Twain's Up!

For one thing, the title is rendered, in some godawful imitation-of-someone's-bad-handwriting font, no less, with a blithering smilie [:)] in lieu of the proper U. And then there's that exclamation point, which is only the beginning: there are no fewer than ten of them scattered among the nineteen song titles. (One song, so help me, has two of them.) What's more, her main competition in the country-crossover-major-babe industry is Faith Hill, who could probably walk off with my heart if I actually had one.

Then there was this incredible conceit on a square of card stock, stuffed into the CD case:

Yep. It's a two-CD set, each CD running 72 minutes and odd, with exactly the same songs in slightly different arrangements and mixes, the green presumably aimed at traditional country fans, the red at the crossover buffs. For the um, record, I listened to the green first.

And really, it wouldn't have mattered if I'd started with the red sides. What makes Up! work isn't spiffy production (which Mutt Lange has been doing for decades) or instrumental timbre, but Shania Twain's songwriting. (Lange gets co-writer credit on all these, but while he may have contributed some instrumental bits, I am convinced these are her songs.) It is said that she refused to tour to support her first album, which she didn't write; she insisted on waiting until she could do an entire set of her own songs. The tracks here suggest that she knew exactly what she was doing, and there are enough hooks screwed into these tunes to outfit an entire Ace Hardware store.

There are pickable nits. I grew up in an era when a three-minute song was the exception, not the rule: if you turned in a 3:15 master to Berry Gordy, it wound up as a 2:55 single. Some of these songs are just too long, especially "Ain't No Particular Way", whose lyric sheet contains the cryptic notation "Repeat chorus (1.5x)". Most of the exclamation points are expendable. And the Twain/Lange combine's penchant for avoiding 4/4, while generally laudable, results in some clunky transitions, especially in "C'est La Vie", which alternates between being strangely arrhythmic and being Abba's "Dancing Queen".

But these are still just nits. What matters in a country record, even a record as far removed from country as this country record, is whether you believe what's being sung. And here, Shania shines; even fairly prefab sentiments like "Thank you baby / For lovin' me the way you do" come through as genuine. At her best — say, "What A Way To Wanna Be!", which actually contains the word "exfoliate" — she is wry and witty and warm.

And if you can't get around the red vs. green debate (there are even a couple of blue mixes available at Twain's Web site), there's this:

I know just what she means. Present-day radio would never permit this sort of thing, which is only one of many reasons why it blows.

And what we're going to see, I predict, is an enormous number of CDs burned at home with some of the green tracks and some of the red.

Incidentally, I had to scrap my planned title for this screed and start over: this does impress me. Much.

During the weeks preceding Thanksgiving, our local classical radio station takes votes from listeners, and on Turkey Day and the day following they count down those works which are most requested.

Since 1995, when this little promotional event got started, the composer at the top of the heap has been Ludwig van Beethoven; in fact, the ever-popular Symphony No. 9 has won every year but one, when it was edged out by No. 5. (Myself, I prefer No. 7, which took third this year.) As a general rule, you're not going to find anything really weird in lists of this sort; it's highly unlikely that more than a handful of people are going to vote for anything by, say, Lukas Foss. (Even Cathy Berberian knows there's one roulade she can't sing.) Still, it's always interesting to see the list, and it seems churlish to gripe about the warhorses that always place; there is, after all, a reason why these works are still around decades, centuries, after they were composed.

(My favorite? Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3. Don't ask.)

For a Saturday the 14th, today definitely seemed more like Friday the 13th.

Quite apart from the fact that I go into a coughing fit every time I assume a horizontal position, I was downright weepy most of the morning, though I attribute this to unlucky programming of the background music. Imagine this block of four in sequence on your local oldies station:

"Past, Present and Future" - The Shangri-Las

"Ask the Lonely" - The Four Tops

"The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine (Anymore)" - The Walker Brothers

"Save It For Me" - The Four Seasons

From back to front, hope, dashed hope, permanently dashed hope, and paranoia. Curiously, the Walkers track started out as a Frankie Valli solo effort, which inexplicably flopped; in some almost-but-not-exactly-parallel universe, this set might have ended with a Four Seasons twin-spin.

The real killer here is "Past, Present and Future", which contains this truly twisted text (it's not really a lyric, since it's not sung):

Beyond that, deponent saith not.

The real fun to come, however, was in cyberspace.

Low grumbles, oo-wah, high weazlings and dwaedy-doop:

Thus spake Frank Zappa in the fictional (I think) story of Ruben & the Jets, a persona assumed by Zappa's Mothers of Invention "in a last ditch attempt to get their cruddy music on the radio," as the Verve LP jacket proclaims. Perhaps uncharacteristically for FZ, he was not being sarcastic: he really loved this stuff. One of Zappa's earliest compositions, in fact, was "Memories of El Monte", a 1963 tribute to the doo-wop shows in the San Gabriel Valley, recorded by the Penguins, whom you may (and should) remember for their recording of "Earth Angel" nine years before.

At various times in the Rock Era, or whatever it's called, it has been fashionable, even de rigueur, to disrespect doo-wop, its ability to grant temporary plausibility to sub-Harlequin-level romantic fantasies, its affinity for nonsense syllables, as though we're supposed to grow out of this or something. If that's the case, count me out. It may be possible to conduct one's daily existence without so much as a hint of misty-eyed yearning — it would certainly make mine less complicated — but what kind of life would that be?

As is often the case, a reminder was delivered by unexpected means: in this case, an MP3 of a song surely I would have forgotten if I had ever known it in the first place. "For Eternity" by Vickie Diaz and an anonymous backing group never got close to the Top 40; I'm not even sure when it was released, though the orchestral backing, reminiscent of a couple of Crests hits, suggests 1960. As a singer, Diaz doesn't have an enormous amount of range, and what range she has is pitched too close to Ray Peterson for comfort. But it doesn't matter; what makes this song work is its absolute conviction that True Love is not only imminent but inescapable. (See "Angel Baby", Rosie and the Originals, which is sung asthmatically and played ineptly and which packs a wallop just the same.)

None of this is meant to suggest that you should immediately shelve Verklärte Nacht or Kind of Blue and immerse yourself in street-corner harmony. But once in a while, you ought to make the trip, if only to see where you wind up when your heart leads the way.

In the town of Americus, Georgia, Meri Edgemon, 53, was perhaps best known as a patron of the local arts, and she was greatly mourned when she was killed in a single-car accident south of town this past weekend.

To those of us with a tad more dementia in our souls, Meri Edgemon was Meri Wilson, quintessential Southern blonde, who in 1977 (the breakup of the Bell System was still more than six years away) put out one of the snarkiest 45s of all time: "Telephone Man", the story of a tech from the phone company who could put it anywhere she wanted it.

Follow-up discs didn't go anywhere (though 1980's "Peter the Meter Reader", like "Telephone Man", became a staple of the Dr Demento radio show), and Wilson dropped back into obscurity, but she was never quite forgotten — at least, not by me.

The legendary Vox label has released some 5000 recordings since its birth in the late Forties, and very few of them are available on Compact Disc. Shoving a lot of reissues onto the market is expensive and carries no guarantee of any return on investment. What to do? Vox's answer is Vox Unique, a service by which someone from Vox will go pull a master from the archives and run you off a copy on CD-R for twenty bucks (thirty if it takes two of them). No liner notes, scant artwork, but I suspect a lot of these will go to people who have worn out their old Vox (or Turnabout or Candide) LPs, who already have the pertinent information. And if you've always wanted a copy of Kissing, Drinking and Insect Songs (the Sine Nomine Singers, on Turnabout 34485 from about thirty years ago), now's your chance.

(Via Hit & Run)

Anyone who read this log on the first of December (I know there must be at least three of you) noticed that I had mostly kind words for Shania Twain's Up!, with perhaps a hint of puzzlement over the necessity for separate green (down-home Nashville) and red (pop-rock somewhere between Abba and Def Leppard) and blue ("world music" for issue outside the US) mixes of the nineteen songs.

I have now seen the video for the first single, "I'm Gonna Getcha Good!" And I should not have been surprised to observe that the version played on CMT seems to contain almost, if not exactly, the green mix, while VH1 has a copy with the red mix. And I can appreciate the marketing effort here, but turn down the sound and actually look at the silly thing, and you'll witness a lame retread of themes that looked absurd twenty years ago in Tron. The whole thing reeks of "Well, we've got more money than God, let's spend some of it."

Dear MTV (yet another Viacom outlet): It's about time for Shania: Unplugged.

One of the very first pages on this site, going all the way back to May 1996, was titled Bottom 20 of the Top 40. It was, as you might have guessed, a list of twenty tunes which at the time I thought had been insufficiently reviled.

Now appearing at Solonor's Groovy Grove is a list of Worst Songs, a list far more extensive than mine and which includes some songs I would actually defend if no one was looking (Terry Jacks' take on Jacques Brel's "Seasons in the Sun", which, as English-language versions go, is far better than Rod McKuen's, and it's McKuen's lyric, mostly), some songs I sort of enjoy (Kim Carnes' "Bette Davis Eyes"), and some songs I dearly love (almost anything by the Four Seasons, but "Dawn" in particular).

That said, there are two songs that get top dishonors from both of us: Paul Anka's creepy "(You're) Having My Baby" and the Captain and Tennille's chirpy "Muskrat Love". If you own a radio station and these are on your playlist, this is why we're listening to your competition.

("Judy's Turn to Cry"? The nerve.)

Peter Schickele opens his weekly radio show with a quote from Duke Ellington: "If it sounds good, it is good." And Schickele's selections are nothing if not eclectic; over the years he's played everything from the Allman Brothers to Jan Dismas Zelenka. But Schickele's a white guy, and a Midwestern white guy at that, and according to our self-appointed Ministers of Cultural Diversity, he must therefore be counted among the oppressors. No claim is made that this is why funding for Schickele Mix seems to have evaporated, but sometimes I wonder.

Meanwhile, David "Clubbeaux" Sims has had it up to here with this sort of thing:

I'd quibble with that 87-percent figure, and I'm not quite sure what he means by a "rap stool", unless he's referring to a product of defecation — which he very well could be, given some of the, um, crap on the radio these days — but definitely he's on to something. I have, or can get, access to an almost infinite variety of music, and my tastes do range fairly widely, but given my nonstatus as Person of No Recognizable (or Exploitable) Color, it is presumed that if I scorn some particular marketing category, it must be because of some toxic animus towards those individuals who produce it. (Translation: "You don't like hip-hop? So how long have you been taking marching orders from Trent Lott?")

This, of course, is horse puckey. Rap, like any other cultural endeavor, is subject to Sturgeon's Law. And when it was literally fresh, it was new and startling and entertaining. Then someone got the idea that it should be promoted, not as a genre, but as an Authentic Folk Voice, bluegrass with sidewalks and manhole covers, and distaste for it could be explained only by the most vicious racism. It's been going downhill ever since. I'm not suggesting that we pluck kids from the inner city and give them a daily dose of Debussy or anything, but letting them grow up with the descendants of Bad, Bad Leroy Brown as role models isn't doing them one damn bit of good, either.

Monday, a task force led by Tulsa Mayor Bill LaFortune will discuss the disbanding of the Tulsa Philharmonic, and what, if anything, can be done about it. The orchestra's board, seeing no way to get around a debt load of $1 million, has suspended the rest of the season and closed the office.

We know this situation here at the other end of the Turner Turnpike. The Oklahoma Symphony Orchestra folded in 1988. It took some doing, a lot of donations, and some concessions from the American Federation of Musicians, but we have an orchestra again. There's really no reason they can't do the same in Tulsa.

Yeah, and a Porsche is only a car.

The Rolling Stones are here. They'll play tonight at the Ford Center in downtown Oklahoma City.

No, I'm not going. In my present emotional state, which may be best described as "insufficiently repressed", I don't believe I could handle it.

And the Stones on the same night as the State of the Union address? Obviously this isn't the situation for which they wrote "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" — but it seems to fit just the same.

Aaron Haspel was talking about something else when he stumbled across something with MetaTruth potential:

I'm not ready to claim that this is invariably the case, though I have no trouble finding examples. For instance:

Blonde on Blonde: Does anyone even play "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" anymore?

Revolver: "Yellow Submarine"? Oh, please. And "Eleanor Rigby" is tired enough to stuff into a jar by the door.

Zeppelin's officially-untitled fourth: technically, "Stairway to Heaven" wasn't a single, but it got more airplay than the rest of the tracks combined, to its everlasting detriment.

Zeppelin's officially-titled fifth, Houses of the Holy: This would be, inevitably, "D'yer Mak'er". Even the James Brown parody ("The Crunge") was funnier.

I'm sure those of you who have actually listened to something released in the last two decades can add to the list.

JB Doubtless, bless him, understands Shania:

And, more important, he understands pop. From the same piece:

"The Only Band That Matters," we were told. And, as it turned out, the Clash did make some damned good records. But we remember them because they were damned good records, not because they encapsulated the Zeitgeist or because they stuck it to The Man or for whatever reasons were being bandied about in those days.

Catchy drivel? Up! might be. So was Pachelbel's Canon in D. I'm happy to have them both at hand.

Singer/songwriter Johnny PayCheck (that's the way he was spelling it in recent years), bedridden with asthma and emphysema, has died. The former Donald Eugene Lytle built a reputation for hard drinkin' and hard livin'; he served two years in the Ohio pen for shooting a man in the head. PayCheck wrote many memorable songs, including the lovely "She's All I Got", but his major claim to fame is his Seventies working-class anthem "Take This Job and Shove It", which spawned a motion picture and a thrashing cover version by the Dead Kennedys. PayCheck was 64.

Over at Fragments from Floyd, Fred remembers the pop music of 1963 and how — and, perhaps more important, why — it's stayed with him all these years.

It's still a presence in my corner of the world also, but while wondrous things were going on in pop — Spector's Wall of Sound was at its highest and thickest, the Beach Boys were fusing group harmony to Chuck Berry licks, girl groups were everywhere, and Motown was reinventing R&B — I've always felt that one of the biggest musical stories of 1963 was the one that didn't happen at all.

And just what the hell is that supposed to mean? The answer is in this week's neatly-combed edition of The Vent.

It's somewhere between Then and Now, though closer to Then, and I'm in the sort of record store we don't have anymore, the sort where John Cusack and Jack Black are running things. And I've just made some unfortunate comment about ordering some classical item by mail, which should give you some idea about how long ago this was.

"Why do that? We can get you anything in Schwann," said Cusack.

Well, okay, that sounded like an offer, and I have to admit I was sort of skeptical; I mean, these guys were specialists, and classical music wasn't their specialty — as close as they got, so far as I knew, was that vaguely-Wagnerian noise from Phil Spector's Wall of Sound. Still, throwing business to your friends is the American way, and so I decided to give them the order: the 3-LP box (circa 1975) of Vladimir Ashkenazy's recordings of the Prokofiev piano concerti (London CSA 2314) with André Previn conducting the LSO.

John was as good as his word, and he called me the next weekend to let me know the set had arrived. I didn't even razz him for mispronouncing "Prokofiev". (A weekend or two later, I stumbled over "Penderecki", which surely proves something.) And I played these things endlessly; in fact, in 1982, I peeled off ten bucks more for a cassette copy of the Third and the Fourth from this very set so I could schlep it along in the car. (I didn't get around to buying a really good tape deck until the following year.)

I still have that tape; it squeaks a bit during fast-wind, which suggests that it's probably not long for this world, but twenty-one years isn't at all bad for a commercial-grade (read: cheap) cassette, and it still sounds pretty decent — though not as good as the CD reissue (London 452 588-2, two CDs), which showed up at my doorstep this weekend. It's not ideally configured, what with my two favorites on two different discs, but I can live with it.

What album is at the very center of your existence?

David "Clubbeaux" Sims (that still sounds incredibly cool) makes the case for Exile on Main Street.

And pretty damned convincingly, too.

About every three or four days, someone Googles up the phrase "damhnait doyle anal sex", which last I looked produced four results, three of which had something to do with me and none of which had a whole lot to do with Damhnait Doyle, a young singer from Newfoundland whose first two albums are often played in this household. Specifically, there was the one archive page which mentioned Ms Doyle, and the other two words were separated, not only from the reference to her, but from each other as well, but yes, all four words are on the page, so Google brings it up. I duly posted a report of the first incident to Disturbing Search Requests; my original post thereupon and an archive page containing it are the other two pertinent results.

The recurrence of this search has been something of an annoyance, but it did pay off this evening: it prompted me to see just what she's been up to, since it's been nearly three years since Hyperdramatic came out, and would you believe, she released a new album last week. Not in the US, of course; but this problem is easily remedied by a trip to HMV.com, which is happy to take my American dollars in exchange for Canadian content. So to my anonymous searcher(s): thank you. However, please be advised that I have no idea as to the young lady's sexual proclivities, and I would not be inclined to discuss them if I had.

A moment of noise, if you please — silence wasn't his thing — for R&B legend Hank Ballard, who died yesterday in Los Angeles.

Ballard's Midnighters (originally the Royals, but confusion with the "5" Royales dictated a name change) scored many R&B hits, starting with the salacious "Work With Me Annie" in 1954. But he's perhaps best remembered for a throwaway B side, the flip of 1959's "Teardrops on Your Letter", a bouncy little number called "The Twist", which in a soundalike version by Chubby Checker — Ballard once said when he first heard Checker's record on the radio in 1960, he thought it was his own — became the only record to hit #1, drop off the charts completely, and then hit #1 again the next year, in the midst of dozens of Twist records.

Depending on whom you believe, Ballard was 66, or maybe he was 75. All together now:

Way back in 1980, Vince Vance and the Valiants put out a single that resonated with a lot of us: they reworked Fred Fassert's doo-wop ditty "Barbara Ann", previously a hit for the Regents and later for the Beach Boys (with Hal and his famous ashtray), into the impossible-to-misinterpret "Bomb Iran". I still have the 45, on Paid Records #109.

It was of course inevitable that with the return of unrest to the Middle East (what, was there ever actually rest there?), Vince Vance too would return, and Sparkey's heard the new single, which is of course called "Bomb Iraq". And what's more, he's provided a link to download it in MP3 format if you want it. Which you do.

"Bad Love Songs For Corporate Drudgery Volume VI".

That's what Fraters Libertas' the Elder must endure out there in Cubicle City, and in between periods of mind-numbing boredom he roused himself just enough to deconstruct Air Supply's "Even the Nights Are Better", which apparently makes even less sense when analyzed.

Advantage: 42nd and Treadmill, since they haven't yet complained about my semi-burly JBL Harmony at deskside, pouring out Carl Kasell and Karl Haas and the Kinks.

Reason's Jeff Taylor, on that mawkish country hit that's all over the airwaves:

Although what I really want you to read is a comment affixed to Taylor's post, signed by the pseudonymous (I assume) Garth Strait:

My dislike for "God Bless The USA" is on record, so to speak. And truth be told, I have no particular objection to blatant emotional manipulation. But Nashville is hardly alone in its Us vs. Them insularity; there's a whole anti-Establishment Establishment out there, vending its debatable (though hardly ever debated) message to every genre there is.

And, if nothing else, this justifies someone like Shania who doesn't want to change anyone's hearts or adjust anyone's attitudes: she just wants to lay down some spiffy tunes. As virtues go, it's one of the best, if you ask me.

The parcel from HMV.com arrived this week, and surprises lay within. Most delightful of these was the complete absence of those irritating top-mounted title strips that never quite peel off the jewel box. (The Canadians have more sense about this, eh?) More offputting was the discovery, inside one of those jewel boxes, of an actual copy-protected disc.

On my desktop, Windows Media Player kicks in when presented with an audio CD, unless something else is set to autorun. (This is the case with so-called "enhanced" CDs that contain extraneous stuff of variable interest.) On Davnet by Damhnait Doyle, that "something else" is a little player utility that claims a bitrate about a third of what would be considered acceptable for ripping. The disc directory structure looks nothing like that of a proper audio CD.

I didn't have any particular plans to copy this disc, but I don't much enjoy having a red flag waved in my face either. And anyway, the history of copy-protection tells me that no scheme remains unbreakable for more than a few moments. So the major issue here is "Does it work properly elsewhere?" It plays in the car just fine. My JBL Harmony complained in spots, but then it's finicky; it's occasionally had difficulties with mundane Time-Life discs.

I suppose the next step is to report this to Fat Chuck's, and to grumble when called upon.

When last we heard from Minnesota composer/musician Vicki Logan, she was looking for an audience for her first CD, Chasing Dreams, and hinting that a second would follow eventually.

It took a while, but Finding My Way has found its way to my door, and it's a quite reasonable followup. Logan's melodies, as always, are just slightly off center yet relentlessly tuneful, sort of Enya unplugged; indeed, she takes on Enya's "Only Time" on track 5, and without the usual eleventy-one thousand overdubs, it's almost a whole new melody.

This particular instrumental road is not entirely unknown — Tim Janis, for one, has found his way down it a few times — but it still qualifies as scenic. And maybe that should be the name for this quiet little genre: not boisterous enough for "smooth jazz" and lacking the self-absorption of New Age, "scenic" is perhaps as good a description as any. It's probably not for everyone, but I've always enjoyed the ride.

Keeping track of any music collection big enough to be called a "collection" can be a genuine pain, as Lileks notes:

And that's just the CDs. Toss MP3s into the mix, and things get much more complicated:

Well, sixty-seven, actually, not counting a handful he'd just as soon you didn't include in the total. Haydn, for his part, put out 104. Where it gets really tricky, though, is the symphonic catalog of Bruckner, which contains such anomalies as Symphony No. 0 (which, chronologically, comes after No. 1) and the early "Study" Symphony, which some list as No. 00.

At which time our frustrated collector throws his hands into the air and his portable MP3 player into the trash and immerses himself in the consumption of blessed ethanol in 80, 86 and 101 proof — not necessarily in that order.

John Lennon, says Yoko Ono, would have opposed the war in Iraq had he lived.

The SurlyPundit isn't so sure:

One thing is for sure: Lennon in high dudgeon (not to be confused with Gus Dudgeon, who produced Elton John's early hits) was almost scary to behold, whether the object of his wrath was the Maharishi ("Sexy Sadie"), McCartney ("How Do You Sleep?"), or us effing peasants ("Working Class Hero"). I suspect he still would have had little use for the sort of antiwar type that in earlier years would have been carrying pictures of Chairman Mao.

It's easy, I suppose, to mock the Bay City Rollers, but it's hard to do it with any degree of meanspiritedness. Not even Nick Lowe, who assumed the nom de disque of "Tartan Horde" for his Roller-fan sendup, was able to assume the full Abominable Showman smirk: "Rollers Show" came out wistful, even kindly.

Besides, if you subtract the screaming teenage girls — and why would you? — you're left with the fact that the Rollers were a pretty damn decent band. The ever-eclectic DragonAttack analyzes the first Roller LP, and finds it solid:

Try that with the Backsync Boys, or whatever the hell they were called.

Edwin Starr, who achieved his greatest success growling "War! Unnnh...What is it good for?", has died at the age of 61.

Starr, born Charles Hatcher in Nashville in 1942, was one of the biggest acts on Detroit's tiny Ric-Tic label, with hits like "Agent Double-O-Soul" and "S.O.S. (Stop Her on Sight)", powered by moonlighting members of Motown's Funk Brothers house band. When Motown bought out Ric-Tic and the rest of Ed Wingate's family of labels, Starr moved to Gordy, where he continued to have hits, notably "Twenty-Five Miles" and the epic "War". In the late Seventies, he scored with dance numbers, and eventually, like so many American R&B acts, he found greater success in Britain.

"War", issued on Gordy 7101 in 1970, spent three weeks at #1; Starr's vocal and Norman Whitfield's Wall of Damn Near Everything production made this one of the truly unforgettable records of Motown's pre-funk period. "It had no responsibility for ending the war in Vietnam," noted rock writer Dave Marsh — certainly no more than, say, Freda Payne's "Bring the Boys Home" — but its status as cultural icon seems assured. And what is your record collection, or at least mine, worth without it? Absolutely nothing.

Say it again.

Pearl Jam played Oklahoma City's Ford Center last night, and if anyone had been upset with the band for Eddie Vedder's Dixie Chicks impression the night before in Denver, it really wasn't in evidence. Before the concert, the band issued the following statement:

The determination of the exact quantity of spin contained therein, specified in degrees, is left as an exercise for the student.

And after a brief exposition, Vedder pointed to his close-cropped scalp and said, "How could we not be for the military? I mean, look at this effing haircut!"

Okay, he didn't say "effing". But that was the end of that. There was music to be played.

Eva Narcissus Boyd was the regular babysitter for Louise Goffin, daughter of lyricist Gerry Goffin and composer Carole King. One day, King was doing some keyboard noodling, Eva picked up the beat and started dancing, and Goffin got an idea for a lyric.

Goffin and King booked studio time and brought Eva in to sing on a demo of the new tune, which they intended for Dee Dee Sharp as a follow-up to "Mashed Potato Time", and when it was finished, they realized that they didn't need the demo or Dee Dee; here was a powerhouse single, ready to go. Issued as Dimension 1000 in June 1962, "The Loco-Motion", credited to "Little Eva", shot all the way to #1.

Little Eva scored a few more hits, plus a weird duet with Big Dee Irwin on "Swinging on a Star", then faded, but for a while, she had the hottest voice on the radio. And now she's gone, not quite sixty years old, though her record of course will last every bit as long as dancing will.

Everybody's doing a brand-new dance now....

Rachel Lucas may think she's released her Inner Dork by listening to Lionel Richie, but in reality, she's simply responding to that easiest-to-spot, hardest-to-explain part of every good pop record: the Hook.

And she says so herself:

I know what she means. Every great 45 of the last 60 years or so has one part that's just a little bit greater, a section that reaches out and grabs you by the ear. In, for instance, "Give Him a Great Big Kiss", the Shangri-Las' best record (if not their biggest), the hook is in the second call-and-response, where the music, except for the rhythm, fades away and the most important question of them all is dealt with directly:

"Whaddaya mean, is he a good dancer?"

"Well, how does he dance?"

You can practically see the sigh: "Close. Very, very close."

And sometimes the hook is there because it isn't there. Toward the very end of "Turn! Turn! Turn!", the Byrds intone, "A time for peace / I swear it's not too late," and suddenly the song is grinding to a halt — except that you're counting, two, three, four, filling in the space before the return of the drum and the beginning of the outro.

Self-important artistes scorn the hook. And they wonder why their CDs sit on the shelf.

Fiery singer Nina Simone, a classically-trained pianist who perhaps found her greatest fame as an American civil-rights icon — the searing "Mississippi Goddam" ("and I mean every word of it"), written in 1963 in response to the bombing of an Alabama church, is only the beginning — died today at her home in France. She was seventy years old.

Simone's influence far exceeded her meager chart placings (only one Top 40 hit): her 1959 recording of "I Loves You, Porgy" is definitive, and she inspired artists as disparate as Aretha Franklin, who covered Simone's "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" to stunning effect in 1972, and the Animals, who pounced on her 1964 single of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and turned it into a British Invasion smash.

(Dear Page: Thank you for passing this on.)

Phil at The Third Kind announces that his band will now be known as The Fragments, and offers this theory on naming bands:

The Beatles; Cream. Seems reasonable enough.

To cite an exception: Whatever happened to The The? And are the two Thes pronounced the same, or should they be different? (I tend to read it as "thuh THEE".) Then again, should I really care about a band that has a link to Robert Fisk (yes, the Robert Fisk) on its front page?

I have a choice of two dialups, cruddy and cruddier, and eventually one of them decided to let me download Dr. Frank's spiffy "Democracy, Whisky, Sexy" in all its barely-compressed glory. And damn me if this isn't a dandy little tune. Someone, reports the Doctor, classified it as a cross between "Imagine" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", which seems a fair-enough assessment, though I see "DWS" as the logical extension of Tom T. Hall's 1975 "Faster Horses (The Cowboy and the Poet)", which lists its own American desiderata: "It's faster horses, younger women, older whiskey, and more money."

Of course, "younger" these days doesn't mean what it used to, if it ever did — cf. "I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now," one of Dylan's back pages — but I'm not about to quibble with those other three things.

Today is Duke Ellington's birthday, and the local classical station, which runs a daily segment on composers born on this date, just finished playing a respectful (and not, in my opinion, particularly swinging) arrangement for brass ensemble of "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" and a suitably-pensive solo piano performance of "Solitude".

I have to wonder what self-described "music elitist" Lynn Sislo would make of this; I suspect it's something along the lines of "This is all very nice, but what's it doing on a classical station?" God forbid she should find out they produce a local program devoted to film scores.

As any Dixie Chicks fan will be happy to tell you, the country-music establishment is conservative, even reactionary, and the sort of vague leftish sentiment espoused by the Chicks in recent times is not looked upon kindly by Music Row.

Still, occasionally something sneaks out of Nashville with impeccable left-wing credentials; Fragments from Floyd presents a not-necessarily-definitive list.

No, it's not the sequel to Moby's 1000-beats-per-minute "Thousand"; it's the approximate sales volume at Apple's Music Store, which moved some 275,000 tracks in its first 18 hours of operation.

The Register notes that two labels have signed up for the eventual Windows version of the Apple store, and wonders about it:

As would I. Is there some reason — other than sheer volume — why the music industry should fear Windows users more than they fear Macintosh users?

From the weekly newsletter Reason Express:

Who knew there were more?

A trip to Deepest Ephemera, courtesy of Lynn Sislo:

Actually, that bit was designed to elicit a different response altogether: to hook together the following three thoughts:

"I really love music."
"They must have gone to a lot of trouble to find this story."
"I must go renew my membership at once."

If it seems that there's a disproportionate number of reports like this during the semiannual fundraisers, well, now you know why.

Almost a full house — and no protests — greeted the Dixie Chicks last night at the Ford Center.

Pertinent Natalie Maines quotes:

This could be just playing to the crowd — I mean, "the incident" itself involved playing to the crowd — but I'd like to think she means it.

David "Clubbeaux" Sims is collecting nominations for, as he puts it, "the Worst Song of the post-Beatles (inclusive) and pre-rap pop music era".

The number of truly wretched records from that period is seemingly just this side of infinite — I had no trouble coming up with nineteen myself — but surely there must be a consensus.

And no, it's not Terry Jacks' "Seasons in the Sun", if only because Rod McKuen's version (it's McKuen's English lyric, grafted onto a Jacques Brel melody) is about a hundred thousand times worse than Terry's.

Sotheby's recently auctioned off Beethoven's working manuscript of his Symphony No. 9, bringing in £2.1 million (about $3.2 million US).

Lynn is not impressed in the slightest:

Which is true as far as it goes. But it's not like the Ninth is being locked up forevermore, just because someone with a hefty Visa limit is stashing the manuscript in his vault. What's really precious is not the paper with the notes on it, but the sounds that play in our heads, and no one's ever come close to putting a price tag on those.

(Note to RIAA surfers: Don't get any ideas. And if you do, send the check first.)

Just arrived: Dr. Frank's eight little songs, twenty-four minutes of really nifty mostly-acoustic stuff that may well be the second-best thing ever done in Dr. Frank's bedroom. And yes, it includes the anthemic "Democracy, Whisky, Sexy". Get yours now before it becomes a collector's item and the last copy gets auctioned off at Sotheby's.

Record producer Mickie Most, behind the board for many great English records of the 60s and 70s, has died at his home in the north of London.

Most, born Michael Peter Hayes in 1938, started out as a recording artist, as a member of the British group The Most Brothers. When the group broke up, he kept the surname, and eventually moved into production. Most's greatest hits include the original Animals recordings for EMI, the Herman's Hermits catalog, Lulu's biggest hits (including "To Sir with Love", a US #1 which did not chart in Britain), Donovan's CBS sides (starting with "Sunshine Superman"), and a wild one-shot for an American artist, Brenda Lee's "Is It True". He continued to work through the 70s, often associated with the Chinnichap (Nicky Chinn/Mike Chapman) production combine, and into the 80s. And if you're my age, you probably have something produced by Most in your collection, too.

The Country Music Television list of 100 Greatest Songs didn't contain too many surprises, though the presence of Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man" at the top will undoubtedly reinforce the notion that this 1968 Billy Sherrill production is the ultimate antifeminist anthem.

Which, if you ask me, it isn't. The words are submissive, maybe, but there's always been a streak of quiet acceptance running through country music — Nashville, despite friends in low places, is a very conservative place and boats are not rocked unnecessarily — and while the words (by Sherrill and Wynette) never question, never complain, Tammy's voice, to me anyway, sounds more sorrowful than resolute: she'll never leave him because, well, that's something you just don't do.

And yes, I know "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" came out the same year. But there's a reason they spell it out in front of the kid.

I have raved before about pianist/composer Catherine Marie Charlton, and when I'm not champing at the bit for a new CD (she's released three), I'm wondering what a CMC live performance might be like.

So I'm plotting a route for the World Tour, and it occurs to me: Charlton lives in Delaware. I'm going through eastern Pennsylvania and into New Jersey. Is there any chance she's playing while I'm there?

Well, yes and no. She's performing with The Brandywiners in a production of Me and My Girl at Longwood Gardens, Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, a place I wouldn't at all mind seeing — but she's not playing.

She's dancing.

On one level, I feel rather strangely let down. On another, I marvel at how amazingly talented she must be.

Most of the people in the next lane playing ghastly horrible crap in lieu of actual music are blasting the current variety of degraded R&B/hip-hop.

I said "most". DragonAttack cites an instance when it wasn't:

She didn't, and things actually got worse:

No argument from me.

It's not exactly the result of seven years of hard luck, as Skynyrd used to say, but MCA Records is about to do The Amazing El Foldo, with its pop acts absorbed into the Geffen (or possibly Interscope) labels as a result of restructuring by parent Universal Music Group.

The existence of an MCA record label is pretty remarkable in itself. MCA began as a talent agency, founded by Jules Stein in 1924; eventually MCA merged with the American branch of Decca Records and subsequently acquired Universal Pictures. In the early Seventies, MCA phased out the Decca name, perhaps because of confusion with British Decca (which sold records Stateside on the London label), and began issuing recordings on the MCA Records label. Ownership of the MCA labels changed hands a number of times, and eventually they were restructured to form the Universal Music Group. The Big Six companies at the turn of the century were reduced to Five when Universal acquired the Polygram group, including (yes!) British Decca.

Geffen being a pop/rock label, it seems unlikely that Universal will move the artists from the MCA Nashville roster to Geffen, so the Music City outpost may be the last gasp for the MCA name, a fitting union of pencil-pushers and honky-tonk queens.

If you would know the greatest rock song ever, David "Clubbeaux" Sims says, "Take a walk."

In his best Lester Bangs voice, yet.

No, that doesn't refer to WRR (101.1) in Dallas, which, according to 100000watts.com, is apparently not going to be sold after all.

At Reflections in D Minor, Lynn is putting together a series called Classical Music for the Absolute Beginner. Part I, which appeared a week ago, offers a list of useful Web sites, but the really neat stuff is in Part II, which lists pieces you probably already know.

Ultimately, what I'd really like to see, and it will undoubtedly take someone with a bigger budget for bandwidth, is a Web-based variation on a theme proposed about two decades ago by CBS Masterworks (now morphed into Sony Classical). The so-called Theme Finder (issued as M2X 36929) drew together 222 fragments from the Basic Repertoire on two LPs, complete with origin and (of course) catalog number of the album on which the entire work could be purchased. With a wide range of selections, from the Grand March from Aida to the Zampa Overture, this was a wonderful tool for browsing or for playing some mediumfalutin' version of "Name That Tune".

That Ain't Country dot Com, billed as "Latest Outrages to Grand Ole Country", is one of those sites that bemoan the vapidity of present-day Nashville, and while I suspect its writers would have been just as unhappy forty-odd years ago when Music Row started dubbing in strings behind Patsy Cline, they're delightfully snarky when they find a target — and these days, there's no shortage of targets.

I particularly liked this April denunciation of a Rascal Flatts disc:

You don't even want to imagine what they had to say about the Dixie Chicks.

Sahar Aktar has a piece in Salon that grouses about Apple's iTunes and any successors it may spawn. This is the tag for the article:

This makes the startling assumption that musical creativity and risk-taking are actually associated with the album format, a proposition impossible to defend, especially with statements like this:

This is demonstrably false, and can be refuted in two words: Phil Spector. America's favorite insane record producer was so intent upon getting you to listen to the A side that he would toss throwaway instrumental noodlings (with "titles" based on the names of the sidemen, such as "Tedesco and Pitman") on the back. And away from the Wall of Sound, yes, occasionally a B side would overshadow the A, but it usually took a fairly horrid A side (say, the Tokens' "Tina", which ultimately gave way to "The Lion Sleeps Tonight") for it to happen.

More to the point, albums, as writer Dave Marsh pointed out in the late 80s, remain essentially "singles separated by filler"; regardless of intent, very few albums can be viewed as a coherent whole, and even then, there's going to be something of a hierarchy among the tracks, the stronger ones suggesting themselves as, well, singles. And with 80 minutes available on a CD, too many acts feel compelled to fill up as much of the space as possible, further reinforcing this process.

And then there's this:

Oh, yes. God forbid anyone should record anything that isn't self-written. To hell with all those Tin Pan Alley hacks like Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Creativity lurks all over the damned place. The problem with folks like Sahar Akhtar is that they believe it lurks only in the places they prefer to look; those plebeians who download hits from iTunes obviously have no taste — "How can this be any good? It's played on a Clear Channel station!" Scratch a critic, find an elitist.

"There are," says DragonAttack, "only four jobs worse than mine. Being Carmine Appice isn't one of them."

Then again, she never had to drum on a Rod Stewart disco single. And there's something terribly wrong with that phrase: "Rod Stewart disco single" simply grates on the ears, even if you're not actually hearing a Rod Stewart disco single at the time. (My condolences if you are.)

Once again, Lynn at Reflections in D Minor favors us with another chapter in her excellent series Classical Music for the Absolute Beginner, which manages the neat trick of sounding both encouraging and authoritative. I'm about 35 years beyond absolute beginnership myself, but I'm finding all sorts of useful information in this series. And so will you, unless of course you're one of those benighted souls who is inclined to dismiss the entirety of classical music as dead white men's music, in which case Beethoven's fate — deafness, followed by death — is too good for you.

Most of us who imagine we're on the leading edge of technological and cultural change think of the Recording Industry Association of America as something of a dinosaur. Steve at Begging to Differ sees the organization as a different sort of beast altogether:

A nearly-perfect picture: all it needs is a shot of skier Vinko Bogataj going Tango Uniform as the voiceover intones "...and the agony of defeat."

Velcrometer's M. Giant fisks Simon and Garfunkel's worst song.

What's that? You didn't think anything could be worse than "A Simple Desultory Philippic"? Go back to your vodka and lime.

I was plotting a course this morning with the aid of Messrs. Rand and McNally, when an email came in to remind me that it was the birthday of Renee Diane Kushner, and of course I couldn't let that go by without some mention here.

She was sixteen in 1962 when she cut her first record for Atco, "Little White Lies", with Pete DeAngelis at the helm, a truncated version of her own name for the nom de disque. According to legend, it was supposed to be "Renay Diane," but somebody at Atlantic goofed, and the 45 came out credited to "Diane Renay". So Diane Renay she became.

Another happy accident took place a couple years later. Producer Bob Crewe had gotten her a recording contract with 20th Century-Fox, and together they waxed a ballad called "Unbelievable Guy". It was a flop, but deejays flipped the disk to find a goofy throwaway with spectacular levels of bounciness. "Navy Blue", the tale of a girl whose boyfriend's shore leave can't come soon enough, bounced all the way into the Top Ten, and Renay and Crewe quickly worked up a sequel, "Kiss Me Sailor", which also hit.

Diane Renay wouldn't get close to the Top 40 again, though she continued to record through the Sixties, and resumed in the Eighties after discovering that she hadn't been entirely forgotten after all; in 1987, she cut a new version of "Navy Blue", produced by David Lasley.

Pop music, like any other mass-market commodity, is dominated by the big names; one of its saving graces is that the smaller names, over the years, have made just as many great records. It's why I still remember the little blonde from South Philadelphia after all these years.

Sam Phillips, somewhere around the 1950 opening of his Memphis Recording Service, mused:

Well, maybe not a billion — he sold Elvis Presley's contract to RCA Victor for what now seems a piddling $35,000 — but Sam's influence on early rock and its country cousin is incalculable. One candidate for "first rock and roll record", "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and his Rhythm Kings (that is, with Ike Turner and his band), was recorded by Sam in 1951 and leased to the Chess label; Sun Records, Sam's own record company, was the first major stop, not just for Elvis, but for Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins as well. And Sam's original studio gear, from which he coaxed a sound still renowned for its liquidity, is now on exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. Sam himself was inducted in 1986, and was admitted into Nashville's Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001.

The runout groove came for Sam Phillips today in Memphis. He was eighty years old. And while he didn't wind up with a billion dollars, he did earn many millions, and not just from his recordings either. Sam, as it happens, had taken some of his Sun receipts and invested early on in another Memphis institution that's going strong today: Holiday Inn.

A tribute? Play any Sun 45. Or let John Sebastian wax lyrical about some of those Nashville cats:

And I did, and so did you. And that puts us in pretty good company, alongside those 1352 guitar pickers.

Regular readers will recall that much of this space over the past three years has been devoted to griping about the music industry. And while I think they've earned every bit of the criticism they've received, assuming that everyone in the business is some sort of villain is neither accurate nor useful.

Last night I had a fairly long talk with the head of a small record label specializing in pop/rock reissues, a chap who qualifies as one of the Good Guys. He's of two minds about the Big Five companies: they control roughly 80 percent of the titles available for reissue, so he has to deal with them, but once that deal is struck, they go out of their way to give him decent service. After all, they have an incentive too: tracks sitting in the vault aren't making them any money.

Unfortunately, they're not making him all that much money either; those license fees are stiff, and the drooling collector-geek crowd (such as, well, me) who can be counted on to buy almost every single release simply isn't large enough to make those releases profitable. As a music buff, he'd like to exhume rare and precious tracks; as a businessman, he knows he has to surround them with familiar stuff to maximize sales potential.

We really didn't get into the piracy question. It seems reasonable to assume that it's probably not doing him any good, but since his label has a reputation for high-quality sound, getting the same recordings as lower-quality MP3s is not likely to appeal to his target audience.

All in all, it was a useful discussion, and while I didn't have a pitch of my own to make, I think I held up my end pretty well. And I have the small comfort of knowing that somewhere in the monstrous, monolithic music industry, there's someone who is actually interested in what I might want to hear.

I am no kind of bluegrass expert. On the other hand, my father was, and is, a devotee of the sort of country music that grew out of bluegrass, and resisted the orchestral intrusions that followed, which inevitably meant that I grew up with Lefty Frizzell and Webb Pierce and Kitty Wells and Ernest Tubb; taking a step or two sideways up into the hills was not so difficult for me.

The advantage of being no kind of expert, of course, is that there are still plenty of discoveries to be made, and one of those discoveries, for me, was a store. And what a store it is: County Sales, down the hill from something or other in beautiful downtown Floyd, Virginia, seems to be the repository for all that is good and melodious in Appalachia. Fred First and I wandered into the modest little operation, and I was instantly smitten: there was enough there to justify filing by label and catalog number. (At the time, I didn't know they also did a thriving mail-order and Web business.) I snagged an Alison Krauss album I hadn't seen before, and asked the staff about late-Fifties/early-Sixties Starday recordings of the Stanley Brothers. Somewhere a lamb shook his tail twice, and before the second shake was quite through they'd come up with a 4CD box set. I didn't want to schlep this all the way across the country and have it melt down on me in the trunk, so I asked them to mail it out when I got home, which they did.

And yes, I suppose I could have gotten the same box set from amazon.com, but I wouldn't have had the thrill of browsing the old store, and I would have had to fork out an extra eleven bucks to boot. God only knows what it would have cost to special-order it from one of our wondrously-uninformed chain stores.

Lynn Sislo administers a semi-detached suburban quasi-fisking to this MSNBC piece, and while I was reading her specifications for writing a classical-music editorial, I remembered this thing I wrote last year. Let's see if I meet her standards:

Apart from claiming that Seventies LP pressings from Europe were better, I didn't have much to say about the Continent, but I did issue the pertinent lament. One-half point.

I didn't do that.

I didn't do that, either.

"[I]t is assumed we won't buy unless we are assured we're getting something with established market appeal." I'd say this probably eliminates Pierrot lunaire somewhere along the way. One-half point.

Never. :)

Do you get the feeling that twelve-tone is the cod-liver oil of music? It's supposed to be good for what ails us, but damn, it's hard to swallow.

"[The] audience may always be a minority, but there's no indication that it's shrinking. And while the bigger labels go after 'crossovers' and other ephemera, smaller companies are always there to take up the slack." Close enough. One point.

The hell with them. The only reason they go to the opera house is because it's air-conditioned. (Yeah, I know, this is the sort of thing one says about a place like Tulsa, but then Tulsa actually has an opera company, and this gives me a chance to mention it while simultaneously sneering at the Europeans.)

"This may not be quite a Golden Age, but certainly its mettle is strong." One point for sheer syntactical hubris.

So on the Lynn scale, I score 3 out of 9, which disqualifies me from writing stuff like that — or like this Newsweek piece that I covered last month. Perhaps it's just as well.

For your love,
Oh, I would do anything,
I would do anything,
For your love.

Ed Townsend's "For Your Love" is one of the great R&B ballads of 1958, its simple lyric married to a spectacular orchestral (and choral, featuring the Blossoms) structure. Issued on Capitol 3926, it was a #7 R&B hit (#13 pop), though subsequent singles over the next three years failed to click.

Ed kept writing songs, though, and in 1963 he took over as the A&R man for Scepter/Wand in New York, replacing Luther Dixon. Theola Kilgore scored a 1963 hit with Ed's "The Love of My Man". "Foolish Fool", written and produced by Ed for Dee Dee Warwick in 1969, was nominated for a Grammy. In 1973, recovering from a bout with booze, Ed wrote "Let's Get It On", partly as a reminder to himself to get on with his life; once adopted by Marvin Gaye, it became an ode to sensuality that's still hard to beat thirty years later. Townsend's last big hit was "Finally Got Myself Together" for Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions.

Now Ed's gone; his heart finally gave out. He was 74. If you need me, I'll be at the record shelf.

I'd gotten away from "Weird Al" Yankovic for a while. Partly it was his erratic release schedule, but mostly, I think, it was the discouraging notion that pop hits these days are largely crap, and not even Weird Al-level parody can save them from their fecality.

Nova tossed me a copy of Poodle Hat. "You need to hear this," she insisted.

I took it home, shoved it into Drive H: and was promptly informed that I needed to upgrade QuickTime to at least 6.0. Nine point something megabytes later, I got to see the Enhanced features, including a genuine set of Yankovic family home movies with up-to-the-minute commentary. Good enough, I suppose, but isn't this what AL TV is for?

Finally, to the music. And yes, the hits, as expected, suffer from high crud levels, though Avril Lavigne's "Complicated" is handled beautifully. What you want here are the Al sort-of-originals, and Poodle Hat contains two of the best he's ever done: "Bob", a Dylanesque (circa "Subterranean Homesick Blues") number in which every single line is a palindrome, and "Genius in France", arguably the first successful Frank Zappa pastiche in recorded history, complete with bizarre changes in tempo, lyrics stuffed full of innuendo, odd noises masquerading as vocals, and serious guitar-hero riffing — some of which is contributed by FZ's son Dweezil, a serious guitar hero in his own right.

Then there's "Party at the Leper Colony", a spiffy update of "Willie and the Hand Jive" that...um, maybe I'd better leave it at that.

And, oh yes, there's a polka. Some things never change.