The music industry’s fear of the Dread Pirate Anyone borders on legendary these days. (And of course, when Anyone retires, someone else will assume the, um, position.) This ongoing neurosis, I submit, has affected them in ways they never anticipated. For instance, it would be nice if they could handle a simple task like coming up with sheet music on request, but apparently they’ve had trouble with the concept for some time:

It’s been a while since I purchased band parts, but I remember the process as often being expensive and frustrating. Even if you could obtain what you were looking for (no certainty), the instrumental parts supplied never seemed to match the ensemble (too many clarinets and not enough flutes, for example). That problem was- supposed to- lead to an order of extra parts from the publisher (frustrating, with long delays and outrageous per-page charges), but was (usually) solved with a bit of clandestine copying (a.k.a. *PIRACY*) instead.

I bounced this off Trini, who (apart from being all those other wonderful things I’ve mentioned) was a major band geek, and she confirms: “Oh, the days of standing at the copier for hours running sheet music through…”

There would seem to be a potential solution at hand:

Even back then I was wondering why arrangements didn’t come as a printed conductor’s score plus a disc of PDFs.

Probably due to the Dread factor.

In a piece about Glen A. Larson, I came up with this observation:

All this supports the case for the Four Preps (!) as major cultural influence: the very same Glen A. Larson was a member, and so was the late Ed Cobb, who went on to write iconic tunes like “Dirty Water” and “Tainted Love.”

Time to mention a third Prep: Bruce Belland, who still sings with the current incarnation of the Preps, and whose daughters are the heart of the alt. band Voice of the Beehive.

Now to find something on Marv Ingram.

(Via Little Miss Attila, who turned up a video of the Belland babes covering a Partridge Family hit.)

Yours truly, reviewing a wondrous little record called “You Wouldn’t Listen”:

For those of us who loved the British Invasion, this jangly welding of Searchers guitars to Hollies harmonies, issued on London Records’ Parrot label, erstwhile home of Tom Jones and the Zombies, was a wonderful addition to the ‘66 airwaves. How were we to know that the Ides (or, as they were once billed, the “I’des”) hailed from the highly-unBritish Berwyn, Illinois? Then again, it probably wouldn’t have mattered if they’d hailed from ancient Rome; while no one would have ever accused them of being wildly original, they were a truly solid band with decent songwriting chops. “You Wouldn’t Listen” was written by guitarists Larry Millas and Jim Peterik and drummer Mike Borch, with Peterik taking the lead vocal. Chicagoland ate it up, and after a false start with the Windy City’s own Mercury label, London leased the track and put it out nationally on Parrot, where it stalled just short of the Top 40. After years on the label and only one other chart item (the Byrds-y “Roller Coaster”), the Ides decided to change direction, and noting that other Chicago bands, including, well, Chicago, were selling tons of records with horns, they delivered a single to Warner Bros. that fit right into the mold — Peterik’s “Vehicle”, which brought the Ides to #2 with a song that sounded nothing like them. At least they finally got a hit.

“Vehicle” has been their calling card ever since. The band faded in the 1970s, Peterik resurfacing as a member of Survivor, and when the Eye of the Tiger began to close, the Ides reunited. They’ve been a working band ever since, which is somehow reassuring, given the dread connotations of their name.

“How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?” To borrow a studied Sinatra-ism, you can’t have one without the other, and that’s exactly the way Pink Floyd wants it:

Pink Floyd won a legal battle Thursday against EMI that prevents the band’s long-time record label from selling individual songs online.

Sir Andrew Morritt, chancellor of Britain’s High Court, ruled that Pink Floyd’s contract forbids EMI from breaking up the band’s albums without its permission, according to a spokeswoman for the British judicial system. EMI had argued that the stipulation only applied to physical albums, not online sales.

The group’s contract reportedly contained a clause to “preserve the artistic integrity” of their albums. The band has traditionally resisted selling individual songs from their “concept albums,” which are meant to be listened to from beginning to end.

As of five minutes ago, the iTunes Store was still vending individual tracks, albeit at the higher $1.29 price, except for stuff from The Division Bell and various live performances, priced at 99 cents a track.

I spotted this at LP Cover Lover, and yes, it’s a 45, but what caught my eye (other than the rather striking art) is the utter absence of performer identification, at least up front:

Trying to track this down brought me to Both Sides Now Publications, where I found this bit of instruction:

There is little of collectors’ interest on the original Bell records of the ’50s. They generally tended toward cover versions of popular hits of the times, much as the Tops label did, or “generic” non-hit pop.

Number 147 was one of the last of the original Bell 45s, before they mutated into a more-or-less full-service record label. Billy Winter does the Crests cover on the A side, and Ken Wright appears in the Ron Holden role on the flip. And maybe one of this series might be of interest to collectors after all:

The single of real interest is 120 with an A side by “Tom and Jerry” who later became better known by their real names Simon and Garfunkel.

Tom Graph and Jerry Landis, S&G’s noms de disque of the time, actually had a chart item circa 1958, the Everlyesque “Hey, Schoolgirl” (Big Records 613, #49 in Billboard). If it’s the same T&J, I’d definitely like to hear them taking on Jan Berry’s “Baby Talk.”

(Disclosure: I have contributed a few items to the BSN discography list.)

Some time around the end of 2002, maybe the beginning of 2003, I knocked out a CD-R full of songs with numbers in their titles. It took me another two years to mention it here on the blog, and then only because a friend was looking to do a similar but more extensive project.

Finally I’ve gotten around to doing Volume Two, as it were. I’m assuming that basically I’m just out of ideas.

Technically, there are 351 possible chords in the equal-tempered scale as we know it, though there are only 12 which are “musically distinct.”

After this, you’ll wonder what happened to the other eight.

(A brief bit of salty language near the end. From Ethan Hein via Donna B.)

American VI: Ain’t No Grave, recorded by Johnny Cash and producer Rick Rubin in 2003, was released this week in time for what would have been the Man in Black’s 78th birthday, and in time for this reflection by Lisa:

He was also the old style American Christian I wish we had more of. He recognized his frailties, once saying, “Some people know just how to go straight to Heaven. I’m someone who has to get there one half mile a day.” He had a strong faith, but never waved it in anyone’s face or forced it on anyone. He just lived it. And that was inspiration enough. When he sang, with the voice of an Old Testament Prophet, you just had to sit up and listen. Rick Rubin, his last producer and a Jew, tells how Johnny once asked if he could take his hand and pray with him. It became a ritual with the two of them, even during telephone conversations. Rubin says he felt blessed to be so honored by a man of faith and included in that faith, even if it wasn’t his own.

We could use a lot more of that, along several different vectors.

Of course, his work and concerts in prisons are the stuff of legend. Based on that, I’ve heard some call Johnny “the original Punk”. But he wasn’t — at least if you define a Punk as a nihilistic criminal. Johnny’s lyrics always packed an Old Testament wallop. In a Johnny Cash song, you could break the law, but you paid the price. You might “shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die” but then you’d have to acknowledge “I know I had it comin’, I know I can’t be free”. You could “be in the arms of your best friend’s wife” but then you’d get hung and your paramour would have to “walk these hills in a long black veil”. There was no free lunch and no Gangsta Life in Johnny Cash’s world. And he stood up as the premier example of a man who’d had to pay for his sins.

Only once did Cash ever seem to get away with it: in “One Piece at a Time,” his 1970s tall tale of working at a GM assembly plant and sneaking out an occasional auto part in his lunchbox, until after a couple of decades he had enough to build the Cadillac of his dreams. Then again, what with model changes and all, what he wound up with was, shall we say, not entirely dreamy-looking. Payback is still a bitch.

Still, the title track on the new collection is decidedly New Testament: as Brother Claude Ely used to say, “There ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down.”

A latter-day (well, 1977, anyway) single by the Carpenters advances the notion that “it’s a dirty old shame when all you get from love is a love song.” I certainly don’t expect anything more than that. On the other hand, a good love song is worth hearing on the 364¼ days each year that aren’t Valentine’s Day, and since JenX was kind enough to put up a playlist of some of her favorites, I figure this might be a good time to point you once again to my infamous V-Day mix, now six years old and not even slightly dated. (Then again, I’m fifty-six years old and not even slightly dated these days.) One of these years I’m going to have to knock out a Volume Two.

What little karaoke I’ve done, I’ve done in New Jersey, more than a thousand miles from home. (I’m not entirely dim.) It might have been even better to have sung in the Philippines, which is even farther away, provided I didn’t sing “My Way”:

The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

The killings have produced urban legends about the song and left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the killings the natural byproduct of the country’s culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there something inherently sinister in the song?

We will pause for a second while you ponder the idea of an “inherently sinister” English lyric penned by Paul Anka.

One voice instructor in Manila explains it this way:

“I did it my way” — it’s so arrogant. The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you’re somebody when you’re really nobody. It covers up your failures. That’s why it leads to fights.

And, let’s face it, Sinatra was someone with whom you did not mess. Not that any of us are Sinatra.

Let us not, however, assume that karaoke-related killings are unique to the Philippines:

In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Karaoke-related assaults have also occurred in the United States, including at a Seattle bar where a woman punched a man for singing Coldplay’s “Yellow” after criticizing his version.

There have been times when I wanted to punch Coldplay for singing “Yellow,” but that’s neither here nor there. Nor in New Jersey, for that matter.

It was true in the days of American Bandstand, and it’s true today: you can boost the sales of your recording by a TV appearance. And yes, that goes for classical music too:

On Jan. 14, the violinist Hilary Hahn scored a rare gig for a classical music performer: She appeared on The Tonight Show. And not just any Tonight Show, but the Tonight Show during the final days of Conan O’Brien’s brief tenure as host. Everybody was watching. So it came as no surprise that Hahn’s new album, “Bach: Violin and Voice,” debuted that week at No. 1 on the Billboard classical charts.

You knew there was a catch, right?

[S]ales figures are so low, the charts are almost meaningless. Sales of 200 or 300 units are enough to land an album in the top 10. Hahn’s No. 1 recording, after the sales spike resulting from her appearance on Conan, bolstered by blogs and press, sold 1,000 copies.

Farther down the chart:

In early October, pianist Murray Perahia’s much-praised album of Bach partitas was in its sixth week on the list, holding strong at No. 10. It sold 189 copies. No. 25, the debut of the young violinist Caroline Goulding, in its third week, sold 75 copies.

Of course, the charts show only US sales; most classical recordings are aimed at the worldwide market, and you have to figure that Perahia, at least, is a big name across the pond.

But Hahn is no slouch. This is her second debut at #1 — and the first, amazingly, was a pairing of concerti by Sibelius and Schoenberg, released in 2008. I have to admire anyone who can get anything by Schoenberg this high up the charts, especially something the composer himself described as “unplayable.”

Film composer-to-be Spencer Nunamaker, studying at Berklee, drops a hint as to how long it takes to put together a film score:

Typically, for most film composers in Hollywood, writing 2 minutes of music a day can be considered a success. With that in mind, one could reason that if you were scoring a typical 90-minute movie, you could probably expect to take 6-8 weeks to compose the music.

And, of course, you don’t get to start on those two minutes a day until the rest of the film is more or less completed. The schedule might go like this:

Week 1: The composer receives the rough cut, attends the spotting session, and the music editor prepares timing notes.

Weeks 2-5: Composing begins, gives rough copy of music to the orchestrator who orchestrates it, and sends to the copyist.

Weeks 7-8: Dubbing music with sound effects and dialogue.

Week 9: Film goes to lab for answer prints and color correction.

Week 12: Film is delivered to theaters for wonderful fun time for all.

I have no idea whether contemporary computerized tools are helping or hindering this process.

“Every Breath You Take” gets played at weddings, fergoshsakes, and it’s about as inappropriate a tune for such an occasion as can possibly be imagined: the lyrics practically scream “Stalker!” I see it as being more generally Orwellian, but then again, we’re supposed to love Big Brother, right?

And if it’s not the least-appropriate wedding song ever, how about …

My friend picked “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys 4 her wedding song. Why would u pick a song that starts “I may not always love you”?

As tweeted by Riki Lindhome, the leggier half of Garfunkel & Oates.

I might worry that her friend might actually be thinking realistically instead of romantically; as the Boys noted two songs later on Pet Sounds, “Love is here today and it’s gone tomorrow / It’s here and gone so fast.”

But lyricist Tony Asher knew what he was doing with that opening line. It’s that old perception-versus-reality thing again: you might want to question my devotion at some point, but ultimately “I’ll make you so sure about it.” And really, have you ever seen a couple this side of Darby and Joan who didn’t occasionally have their differences? “The couples cling and claw and drown in love’s debris,” noted Carly Simon (and/or Jacob Brackman) several years later. But still they cling.

So “God Only Knows,” as the young folks used to say, tells it like it is. By all means, play the record. Everybody in the place will be singing along before the instrumental break anyway.

Shot by Elisson, who presumably did not shoot the deputy.

Willie Mitchell, your all-purpose Memphis music guy for over half a century, has died at the age of 81. He’s probably best known for his work with Al Green during the early 1970s, while he was running Hi Records. Over at Single File, I’ve put up a piece about the record that introduced me to Mitchell back in 1964: the stomping instrumental “20-75.”

I suppose it wasn’t easy being green after all.

(Via Eileen Chew.)

MC Thumbtack on “If This Is It”:

I was working in the record store when this came out and I was at the time heavy into buying import singles of post punk bands and working on maintaining my edgy, yet sophisticated personality that was trying to say “Hey, I’m totally 80s without being, you know, totally 80s.” Because there were two kinds of 80s. There was the New Order 80s and there was the Huey Lewis 80s.

If ever I need to reconcile these two sets of 80s, I need only turn back partway through the 70s — to Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True, on which the backing is provided by California country-rockers Clover, whence came, yes, Huey Lewis. It’s a tenuous connection, since neither Lewis nor latter-day Clover keyboardist Hopper, who joined Lewis in the News, actually played behind Costello, but it’s enough to justify my attention to both tines of that forking decade.

I should probably create a category for this, since it happens so often.

Trini’s gone for a week, which gives me something of a Sad, but it also gives me something to look forward to: her return.

Meanwhile, Sonic Charmer has an anecdote about singer Nana Mouskouri which eventually evolves into a political discussion, which sent me back to the preceding paragraph, inasmuch as in this particular picture, Mouskouri, then about 39, managed to look vaguely Trini-ish. Not that I knew that when I shelled out however many dollars for the 1974 album Que je sois un ange, for which that’s the cover photo.

And this album contains perhaps my favorite Mouskouri track, which exemplifies, I think, the good sort of multiculturalism: a Greek singer on a Dutch record label singing, in French, a song written by an Anglophone Canadian. Definitely a win-win. Not much to see in the video, but that’s not why it’s here.

Yep, brain drift. Sometimes the heart follows. (If the YouTube box refuses to show itself, try here.)

I have no discernible musical talent, and I’ve proven it on several instruments over the years. Just the same, I’ve probably spent more time than most non-musicians thinking up potential band names, from The Flighty Revengers to The Last Angry Band to, most recently, The Acetones. (Which someone beat me to, and by “someone” I mean, among others, Bill Forsyth.)

There is bound to be disagreement over the best band names, and I can’t endorse every selection made by Paste magazine this month, but I am happy to see several of my favorites mentioned therein.

(Via Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

This started out as one tweet, and cascaded into four:

I find it a bit disturbing that there are pre-adolescent boys singing pop love songs on the radio.

I do not think kids’ voices and pop songs mix. At all.

Pop songs call for more robustness. ‘Cause think about it: do pop songs sound at all good blasted at treble?

For me, the gold standard for pairing kids’ voices and music would be something like the stuff in Les Choristes.

Which latter is perfectly sensible, but try getting it onto the radio.

The reason for this sort of thing, of course, is the perceived need for Non-Threatening Boys, because girls in the targeted audience (officially 13-17, in practice more like 9-12) allegedly can’t deal with anything that contains visible or audible testosterone. This is not to say that you can’t make good records this way — see, for example, almost the entire Herman’s Hermits catalog — but it is, ultimately, a field with distinct limitations.

Incidentally, if you want maximum treble and vague levels of robustness, you go for Bob Seger’s 1969 “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,” which sounds like they had the equalizer set to match the Gaia-worshippers’ beloved hockey stick.

Earworms, contrary to popular belief, were not invented by Khan Noonian Singh, but sometimes they can be persistent enough to qualify as some sort of weapon.

Some of the crawlers with which Francis W. Porretto is beset are TV themes, from the era when TV themes were actually given some thought. Of course, this gives me an opportunity to plug some of my latter-day favorites:

• Angelo Badalamenti’s weird Philip Glass-meets-Duane Eddy theme for David Lynch’s creepy series Twin Peaks, which stretches to over five minutes on the soundtrack album.
• Also very creepy: the original theme for Unsolved Mysteries, by Michael Boyd and Gary Remal Malkin, which is somehow even creepier with the voice of host Robert Stack.
• Not at all creepy: Patrick Williams’ jazzy theme for The Bob Newhart Show, titled “Home to Emily.” Williams worked up several variations during the show’s run, the funkiest of which sounds like the first sixty seconds of this later recording.
• Speaking of variations, Dennis McCarthy’s opening theme for Parker Lewis Can’t Lose was never recorded the same way twice: each episode was different, yet somehow the same. (The version under the closing credits remained constant.)
• Not exactly a TV theme by this definition, yet a theme that appeared on TV, and one that I’ve plugged here before: Ferdinand J. Smith’s bumper that introduced HBO Feature Presentations, circa 1983.

Try getting these out of your head.

There once was a time when the primary concern of a record company was something other than how many units were shipped, as Mark Alger notes:

There was a reason that music overtook the consciousness of so many people in the ’60s and it didn’t have anything to do with hippie ways or political movements. It had to do with who was running the record companies and their outlook toward their “product.” In fact, I would peg the start of the decline in the industry that we see the other end of today to the period in time when use of the term “product” to describe music became current and acceptable.

This is not to say that there weren’t some blatant examples of mercenary behavior, even among the revered record men of that era. Berry Gordy, Jr. was indisputably one of the Good Guys, but he was ruthless when he thought he had to be: irked that the Funk Brothers house band was moonlighting for Eddie Wingate’s small family of Detroit labels, and unable to persuade them to stop doing so, Gordy wrote a large check to Wingate, ostensibly to acquire Edwin Starr’s contract, and bade him go away.

Still, even on the Motown assembly line, it was never “product.” Nor was it at Warner Bros., where acts like Randy Newman, whose first two albums never charted at all — Harry Nilsson actually did better than Newman with Newman’s own songs, at least at first — weren’t threatened with loss of contract if they didn’t shape up.

It’s disheartening, to me anyway, that so many of the great labels are now nothing more than that: labels, logos slapped on the finished product.

Actually, you might not want to do that, but when I was twelve, I wasn’t making a lot of progress in that general direction.

And then this happened:

Of course, the big draw was the single, the slinky, semi-seductive “Sugar Town”; it would be many years before it would ever occur to me that it might have something to do with Bad, Nasty Drugs.

And by “many years,” I mean “up until last night.”

Bob Keane already used the best title for his book, and since he’s gone now, I have no qualms about using it here.

Before he was Bob Keane, he was Bob Keene, and before that Bob Kuhn; he played clarinet and fronted big bands, to the extent that big bands would permit themselves to be fronted by a kid like Kuhn.

Somewhere around 1957, Keene went to work for John Siamas at Keen Records. (Note the absence of a final E.) Their first signing was a gospel singer named Sam Cook. (Note the absence of a final E.) Cook had been doing gospel sides for Art Rupe at Specialty, and Rupe was apparently fine with Sam doing secular stuff, until he found out that Sam wasn’t trying to reach the same market as Specialty’s other R&B hitmaker, Little Richard. “You Send Me” and other hits by Sam Cooke made a lot of money for Siamas, not so much for Keene, and Keene decided he wanted to own his own label outright.

“Del-Fi” was indeed like the oracle, only in, um, hi-fi. Keene (not yet “Keane”) had been recording Mexican pachuco stuff around L.A., and out in the San Fernando Valley he happened upon a high-school kid named Richard Valenzuela who played a mean guitar. Signed to Del-Fi in 1958, the youngster was dubbed “Ritchie Valens,” and his first single, “Come On Let’s Go,” charted; the second, “Donna,” was a smash — as was the B-side, a reworking of the old Veracruz folk song “La Bamba.”

One more single was waxed — an instrumental called “Fast Freight,” listed on some labels as by “Arvee Allens,” before February made us all shiver. Keane continued to issue local L.A. stuff, generally with either surf or vocal-group (the word “doo-wop” was studiously avoided in some circles) acts; one of my favorite obscurities continues to hide out in Del-Fi’s archives.

In 1966, Keane’s Mustang label issued tracks by the Bobby Fuller Four, a passel of Texan expats who sounded like Buddy Holly brought up to date; their biggest single, in fact, was “I Fought the Law,” written by latter-day Cricket Sonny Curtis, and they followed it up with a cover of Holly’s “Love’s Made a Fool of You.” For reasons unknown, Bobby Fuller wound up dead; a year later, so did Del-Fi.

In the middle 1990s, Keane reactivated Del-Fi, and, to the delight of record-collector geeks, he started his new numbering sequence where the old one had left off. About the time he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, he sold the label to Warner Music Group. At this writing, Del-Fi.com has gone dark, perhaps in tribute to Bob, who died Friday at 87.

Some web poll purports to list the Top 20 Guitar Riffs, and it’s probably not as arguable as it could have been; I don’t know if I’d put Hendrix’ grinder from “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” at the very top, but then again, most of what Jimi did wasn’t all that riff-driven, “Purple Haze” being the major exception.

As for the rest, well, even those of us who have no business even being in the same room with a guitar have picked out some of them before. A few I’d add, were this my list:

• The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”
• The Rolling Stones, “Gimme Shelter”
• J. J. Jackson, “But It’s Alright”
• Jethro Tull, “To Cry You a Song”
• Rick James, “Super Freak”
• The Kinks, “All Day and All of the Night”
• Marvin Gaye, “I’ll Be Doggone” (probably played by Marv Tarplin)
• The Move (and later, ELO), “Do Ya”

Riffs, of course, predate rock guitar; Bird was thriving on one back in the Forties.

“Classic rock”? Say what?

It’s a bit disconcerting to me that they have changed “classic rock” so now it means mostly 70s and some 80s stuff, as for me, growing up, “classic rock” was like Bill Haley and the Comets and the various 50s and early 60s vocal groups. (I wonder, are they now considered Baroque Rock? or maybe Renaissance Rock? if what came after them is now “Classic” period rock?) And it was really disconcerting a couple weeks ago, when I went to give blood, and they had a “classic rock” program blaring, and “Centerfold” came on. You know you’re starting to get old when a song you hated on its first go-round is now called “classic rock.” (And nothing against fans of the J. Geils Band, it was just that when that song was popular — fall 1981 into spring 1982, maybe? — in the town where I lived, you Could. Not. Get. Away. From. It. It was as if it was being played every 15 minutes. Which, as I remember, was the standard joke about Top 40: that there was a tiny subset of songs played again and again and again, and yet, all the ‘cool kids’ seemed to love it.)

“Centerfold” was in fact released in the last week of October 1981, and it spent six weeks at #1 in Billboard, starting February 6, 1982.

By that time, “Top 40,” which actually had begun as a format which played the top 40 songs, was playing more like 20 or 25. At least some of this was due to sheer song length, though “Centerfold” ran 3:35, about average for early-Eighties singles.

Still, this doesn’t explain “classic rock,” which is a marketing term, not an evaluation of historical importance. All the stuff I listened to as a wax tadpole — the rockabilly and the doo-wop and the surf tunes and the girl groups and the British Invasion acts who weren’t the Beatles — all that is now beneath the radar of the radio industry, because its fans are mostly around my age and therefore of no interest to advertisers. I accept this with a shrug, mostly because if it was a record I liked back then, I probably already have it and therefore don’t have to wait for an interval between auto-dealer ads to hear it.

And yesterday’s gone, says Jeff Shaw:

We used to love listening to AM radio. Everybody I knew had a pocket radio powered by a 9 volt Ray-O-Vac battery that would go dead in about a day and a half.

I had one of those back around 1961: an actual Japanese Transistor Radio with, as the late Allan Sherman said, “a wire with a thing on one end that you could stick in your ear, and a thing on the other end that you can’t stick anywhere because it’s bent.” I still have a radio that runs on 9-volt batteries, but it’s a VHF weather-band unit. (If the Sherman reference seems familiar, you may have seen it here.)

Since my music tastes have evolved, I don’t listen to much radio anymore, so I’m not familiar with any top forty hits. Also, I got weary long ago of hearing the same song over and over, everyday. So much for programmed radio. If it’s Friday at 4:45 pm, I’ll bet you can turn on the radio to some local station get BTO’s “Taking Care of Business.” For the 4 millionth time. After I hear a song 500 times, I sort of lose interest.

I tend to duck stations playing current stuff. Yesterday, zipping down US 62, I caught these guys playing Herb Alpert’s “Rise,” followed by an edit of Steely Dan’s “Do It Again,” in which the infamous plastic organ competently fingered by Donald Fagen was excised.

On the other hand, I’ve already picked up a copy of “Meet Me on the Equinox,” a Death Cab for Cutie single from the New Moon soundtrack, released this past September. It will be a while, I suspect, before it gets its 500th playing.

Alfred Matthew Yankovic, man of personal integrity:

If you already have most or all of my albums, this collection [The Essential "Weird Al" Yankovic] will probably hold little interest for you, unless you’re a completist who just compulsively buys anything with my name on it (bless you, whoever you are). I should also point out that this collection doesn’t include any tracks from Internet Leaks — it didn’t seem right to include songs on a hits compilation before they had a chance to be on an actual studio album.

In my younger days, there were tracks released as singles that eventually showed up on compilation albums — Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street,” the Association’s “Six Man Band,” almost all the early British 45s by the Beatles — but as the album displaced the single as the primary vehicle for vending popular music, the single became the loss leader to move the album, and how are you going to sell a Greatest Hits set to someone who already has all the albums? Right. This has been a sore spot with Trini for several years.

So let us now praise Mr Yankovic for his approach to the compilation album. I would, of course, go out and buy his earlier stuff, except for the minor detail that I’ve already bought his earlier stuff. (And a friend gave me a copy of the Permanent Record/Al in the Box box set, so I have a lot of that stuff twice.)

Steph Waller, as she often does, turned up something interesting: the “two-dimensional sculptures of playable music” by James Plakovic, which he calls MusicArt™. It’s an intriguing idea: drawings which incorporate actual musical staves. (She links to one called “World Beat Music,” set to a Mercator-projection world map.)

This, to me at least, invites one of those chicken/egg comparisons: do you draw the picture first and then see how it sounds, or do you sketch out the basic sound you want and make the picture fit it? I have no talent for either of these things, but the sound of some of them reminded me of an ancient piece of software I still have kicking around these parts: Lars Kinderman’s MusiNum, a fractal music generator. It’s simple in the extreme: give it a starting point, pick some MIDI instruments, and let it rip. I have a couple of dozen files produced by this program, all but one of them identified and credited in the help files. (They’re also here, in the program’s native file format and also as MIDI sequences.) The one outlier in the bunch? It’s dated later than the others, and has a filename on it that looks like the sort of post-DOS syntax I was using back in 1997. Is this something I actually threw together? I wouldn’t swear to it, not today. Still, there’s a vague Steve Reich-on-Vivarin sense to it that sounds like something I’d want to keep. Maybe I’ll let it run for a few minutes and melt it down into an MP3 or something.

They’ll stone ya when you’re tryin’ to keep your seat:

Whenever Dylan did something artistically egregious, in poor taste, inept, schlocky, or otherwise incompatible with his reputation for genius, the reviewers would explain that he was a kind of musicologist, plumbing the roots of Americana, absorbing within himself the variegated traditions of our native music and transmuting them into art uniquely his own. Hence “All the Tired Horses.”

As one of the poor sods who actually shelled out American dollars for Self Portrait in 1970, I’m prepared to defend its opening track: yes, it’s inane and repetitive — so is McCartney’s “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” — but it’s much more listenable than some of the vaunted Zimmerman epics. (Yes, “Hurricane,” I’m looking at you.)

But the occasion here is not to kvetch about forty-year-old trifles; it’s to mock Dylan for having had the temerity to release that most banal of all musical commodities, the Christmas album. I’m not going to run out and grab it myself — last Dylan album I actually bought was “Love and Theft,” eight years ago — but if any track thereupon gets enough radio airplay to crowd out even one iteration of José Feliciano’s beyond-fossilized “Felix Navidad,” I promise to be grateful to ol’ Blind Boy Grunt.

(Via Scuffulans hirsutus.)