Either Steve Gadd's or Carl Perkins' Birthday Random 10

 1. June Tabor - The writing of Tipperary /  It's a long way to Tipperary

2. Alice In Chains - Killer Is Me [Unplugged]

3. The Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Choir - Schopska Pesen

4.  Blackpool Lights -  Empty Tank

5.  Karen Dalton - How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You

6.  Gordon Lightfoot - The Way I Feel 

7.  The Bad Examples -  Feeling Your Head Against The Wall

8.  Fenton Robinson -  Checking On My Woman

9.  Squeeze - Letting Go

10.  Pink Floyd - Run Like Hell

and because it's hard to know when to stop 11. Shannon Wright -  Rich Hum Of Air

Haven't done this in a while--maybe because I've run out of major things to say about music--or at least mah music. But I've had a couple of pleasant musical discoveries in the last few days. One is Yevhen Stankovytch. I'll pick up a composer I've never heard of almost without thinking and, as with my reading, occasionally I get rewarded. Stankovytch walks that perfet twentieth century line between classic forms and jagged adventurous noises. Kind of Shostakovitch with something to prove. Like Arnold Bax, another favorite, it' big, emotional, surprising and beautiful stuff he's doing. The other is Chumbawamba's English Rebel Songs 1381-1984. It certainly doesn't sound like their one hit, or much of anything else they've done (which is vastly more varied than their hit.) It's frankly a beautiful disc: kind of like Steeleye Span, if Steeleye Span were Wobbly agitators. Crystalline lefty songs of anger, defiance and class warfare. I'm in love.

Good as these were, they don't quite rise to what I conceive to be the proper level of a post, so I tack a RandomTen on top of it. And because I don't have any thing profoundly general to say about music, herewith a rundown on the tracks.

1. June Tabor has the archetypal bell-like English folk female voice, but it's matured into something finer. And this is fun: the chestnut "It's a long way to Tipperary" preceded by a song about the song. She not only sings each phrase, she tells you what she thinks of each phrase in her handling of it. Plus you'll learn somefing.

2. The best Alice in Chains album (good as Dirt is) is their MTV Unplugged disc. Face it: the buzz covers a lot of sins--but not in their case. They come by their darkness honestly, and some of the chords are downright startling.

3. I picked up "La Mystère des Voix Bulgares" before a couple of years before they became everybody's favorite sample source. Utterly strange harmonies in an obscure language--I played it to death when I got it. If you get introduced to them now, chances are you'll go "Oh, so that's where those strange backing vocals came from!"

4. It's your typical indie band, with typical earnest indie stretched tenor in front of an uncomplicated setup--but it's a stirring anthem on being a loser. It's hard to resist.

5. I've also talked about Karen Dalton before. Her voice is a little bit scary and a little more wrong, but it's as far as Andromeda from James Taylor's version of the song. I'm really not sure I like it, but it exercises a fascination. 

6. The first date I went on in college was to see Gordon Lightfoot at the auditorium theatre, and for the life of me I can't remember who with. This was back when he was still on United Artists, before he got on to Warner Brothers and "If you could read my mind" and LONG before the Wreck of the Annoying Edmund Fitzgerald. Fotheringay (the Fairport spinoff band) did a killer cover of this song, but the original is good too.

7. I know these guys. One of them did the assessment on my house. They had a fan-following that was deeply disturbing. And Ralph Covert is now a children's music god. But they were as fine a crowd-pleasing band, and Ralph wrote fine, much-better-than-they-needed-to-be-songs. This is one of them. 

8. Lest you think that I just love every one of the 17,000 songs on the iPod, I like rather than love Fenton Robinson. But we shallow white Chicagoans with a sometime pretense to hippitude can get complacent about The Blues. The rest of you have to limp along with something misnamed thee House of Blues, while any night of the year we could have our pick of the real stuff. Fenton Robinson was the real stuff. (I remember going to a restaurant with some comic-book people in San Diego that featured a blues band that was four white guys in Hawaiian shirts who all looked like Kenny Loggins, and I started to shake from something between unendurable sadness and blues withdrawal. How I made it through dinner I don't know.)(Hm? Oh, Ralph Macchio, Mark Gruenwald, Roger Sterm, Art Adams and Klaus Janson, I think.)

9. This is also later Squeeze, not their best stuff. Good songwriting but dull arrangements. With this album (Play) I usually go "Who is this? That's a good song!" before I look at the screen. The stuff from Cool For Cats and East Side Story were unmistakeable--but that's back in the age of Vinyl, and I'm not that obsessive yet to try to transfer and clean that stuff up..

10. And a cramped, menacing doomed  vocal by Roger Waters completely undercut--and made, by the joyous positive anthemic guitar of David Gilmour.

The Wall is Tommy written backwards, and could not have been done without Townshend leading the way. The difference is that the music in The Wall rocks harder, and fights the bloodless cynical paralysis of Waters' vision. It's that tension that makes the Wall listenable, 

and 11. Shannon Wright proves that you can be a female musical eccentric without being Tori Amos.  (or Kate Bush.)

So there you have it: I probably won't try this again, because it feels too much like trying to tell you why every song on my iPod is cool. That's not interesting--or possible. And I have this vision of being the guys I knew in college, absolutely compelled to say something about every track on the record changer.

I've already turned into my father, I don't want to turn into those people as well.