Friday Random Ten Because I Just Can't HELP IT


 


1. Muddy Waters - Rollin' Stone
2. Garth Hudson - The Breakers
3. Tiny Grimes Quintet - Midnight Special
4. Paul McCartney - How Kind of You
5. Per Mission - Reeds Have Parted
6. Van Morrison - When That Evening Sun Goes Down
7. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Et incarnatus est (Mass In C Minor, K427) [Arleen Auger, soprano]
8. Kevin Coyne - My Wife's Best Friend
9. Brian Wilson/Van Dyke Parks - Hold Back Time
10. They Might Be Giants - Window

and one ring to rule them all: Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos - Cum Jubilo.

Just to remind myself that I remain a slave to my neuroses, a Ten like this revives the question of whether I'm getting enough fiber in my diet. In the form of new bands and new new music. I mean, after all, Paul McCartney, Van Morrison, Garrth Hudson of the Band, Brian Wilson (Mozart!)--does it sound like I've been roaming the racks and hitting the clubs for new sounds? Answer: I have not.
It's not even true that, as I sometimes tell my self, that I have scanned the vast array of arrivistes and epigonen and found it wanting--while it is true that I haven't heard much of anybody that has set my hair on fire, I'm not all that hard to please.
Is it fear of growing old? 1) It's too late for that; 2) It isn't actually revulsion, or despair, that I feel, but the feeling that I might, after all, be Missing Something.
While it's true that I don't scavenge the cut-out bins and the used stores, and no longer read *shudder* Rolling Stone or *sniff* Trouser Press--I have to remind myself that I do a lot more previewing at the iTunes Music Store and eMusic than I did in 1978.
It's certainly true that I'll look more eagerly at an artist I know and admire sooner than a complete unknown, and that over the years that list has grown pretty long--and to that extent, my iPod bears the mark of an old guy. (and it is true, that when I write these not-so-little essays, I've tended to gravitate to the joys of my youth--which is a secondary prompt to what I'm writing here.)
But paradoxically, the inevitabillity of Missing Something comes, not as a result of looking less, but looking more. Being a child of Top 40, I focused on the thing that emerged from a crack in its head, and that was counterculture rock, from the Dead and Hendrix to Pink Floyd and Yes, and room for Sly and the Family Stone and Frank Zappa--and everybody else. But soon (as I've said before) 'everybody else' started to include John Coltrane--and Stan Getz and Art Tatum and Fats Waller and Bix Beiderbecke and King Oliver on back into the mists--and then Stockhausen and Elliott Carter and Harry Partch and George Crumb and Kryszrof Penderecki and Iannis Xenakis--and then King Sunny Adé and Fela Kuti and Thomas Mapfumo and Baaba Maal and off that way--and soon I started to have a spotty record in all sorts of categories.
So, when someone (like Amanda Marcotte over at Pandagon) publishes a Random Ten that includes a whole bunch of folks i don't know (Henry's Dress? Casper and the Cookies? Strawberry Switchblade?) it makes me feel remiss a bit--and sends me to iTunes and eMusic to sample, and AMG to read up. And I guess the neurosis is that sometimes it makes me feel old--rather than, as seems equally reasonable, young.

Which sounds like a good place to end it, except that I want to talk about Kevin Coyne. I picked up In Living Black and White in a cut-out bin about '77 or '78--it was 99¢ and a double album!--and it was wonderfully odd, rough and strange. And Kevin was just one of those people who just got stranger and more wonderful as time went by. A lot of stuff never got released in the US, and so I missed it--I'm not fanatic enough to pay 30-40 bucks for an import, thank you very much--and so greeted with glee a copy of Sugar Candy Taxi, where this cut's from. That's one of the things that, while it makes me know I'm old, gives me a pleasure that derives from having a long trail behind me. And I can live with that.

Posted: Friday - March 16, 2007 at 05:00 PM        

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