Shaharazade and I were in the Pearl District of Portland this afternoon. She needed new tennis shoes and the shop that sells a certain brand is there. We picked up a pair for her and she had to go to another shop around the corner. I think that's really why she wanted to go to the Pearl. It's a very nice store called Anthropologie. You might know it. They have lots of locations. Anyway, my point is they were playing music, as they always do, over the sound system and one song in particular, a modern one, reminded me of this first one and the one it reminded me of, reminded me of the rest.
Recently I uploaded my latest creation, a garage rock-y kind of song, "Boo-hoo-hoo". It got a pretty decent reception and I've been working on various possible follow-ups, like "My Old Man is a Drag" and "A Thorn By Any Other Name"...you know, the usual. To fire me up I've been listening to and watching the old school songs. Thought I'd share my inspiration with you...
Sometimes you never know what's going to go through your head. I've kept a list lately of tunes that just popped up for no good reason and then went looking for the videos.
Well....it's been known around here for a month or so that the 90s weren't my favorite years for music. Combined with a disturbing tendency of some talented but not necessarily big-time performers having their videos "embed-disabled" it took me a little longer to finally get it together. But there were some individual songs I liked. I'm cheating big-time here, doing the whole decade instead of a year or two at a time but at least I'll get this over with!
Apparently the chronological thing is over. I just can't find 9 or 10 songs from the 90s that I like enough to post for your entertainment. Instead we're just going to free form it, with today's group of tunes being folk related, which includes blues and folk-rock. So here we go! Turn the hi-fi high and the lights down low! 'Cause here we go with the folk music show!
Apparently I have a block against music of the early 90s. As you might recall, I'd gotten up to the late 80s, then for some reason, did a review of some songs on my iPod, all from the 50s and 60s. Then I skipped a week. Today I'm posting some fairly modern songs I like, instead of going back to 1990-91. Ah well. Consider this a tour of modern music that old fogeys might like.
Taking a break from the chronological review of the pop world, here's a glimpse of my iPod. It's chock full of 50s and 60s stuff. I put it on shuffle and listed what came up. Some of these might be repeats but they're goodies so here we go!
As we moved into the later 1980s the music world was getting away from me. We had Whitney Houston, Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, Richard Marx, Miami Sound Machine....not my cup of tea. Some of the tunes today were big enough hits and some...well you have to dig a little but there's always good music, somewhere!
I'm mad at Prince! Ok, the Beatles don't have songs on iTunes for some reason but at least you can see tons and tons of their stuff on youtube. Prince has made it impossible to see his videos so no Raspberry Beret, which ticks me off! And **** Bryan Adams too. Bryan Adams! Who does he think he is? I like his music, he fits in here but I wanted to use Summer of '69. So **** you, Bryan! Now on to some great performances and some very guilty pleasures.
And then we danced! The early 80s had a lot of entertaining music and these tunes are the kinds of things I was listening to. We'd moved to San Francisco and frequented a club called Echo Beach. These tunes seem like the modern era, thanks to MTV. I didn't get a deja vu feeling exactly, while I was putting this together, but the memories are stronger than any of the previous weeks.
So this disco thing was fading out. Baseball fans were rioting over it in Cleveland. Or maybe that was the 5 cent beer. In Manhattan a different kind of music was growing that soon spread to London and then back to other parts of the U.S.
Here are my favorites of the late 70s, very early 80s punk/new wave scene.
You saw the list yesterday, the one with Barry Manilow, the Captain and Tennille, Olivia Newton-Fig, the Carpenters and so on. Today's stroll will not include any of them, due to my insistence that I have to like something to post it!
1975 was, in retrospect, the last year of the 60s in music. Heavily influenced by what had come before, often performed by the same people. Soon it would be all disco, punk, new wave.
Ok, so I'm skipping ahead a little but I got on a train of thought which led me to my own short-lived career. When 1975 rolled around I found myself in Los Angeles. Shaharazade and I had been in a small town on the Oregon coast and I had to go. I had ambition! We moved to San Francisco but I soon found that SF wasn't the place. I had to go to Hollywood.
While America was entertained or tormented by disco, England was going through an odd phase, where hippies and makeup combined to create the Glam Rock scene. Satin was in. Nuttiness was in. It eventually played itself out by becoming too bubble-gummy. The goofball outfits of Slade and the pop of The Sweet
led to the nice, safe, calculated Bay City Rollers. But for awhile it was a lot of fun.
So the Beatles broke up and things got confusing. The Rolling Stones, for example, no longer had an example to catch up with. Thanks to The Band's rusticana (is that a word?), the Beatles getting back, Dylan's catching rainbow trout being what it must be all about, and hippies in droves leaving the cities to become country dwellers, rock 'n roll was getting soft.
Before we move on to the 70s I wanted to post some instrumentals from way, way back. I think most of these are familiar. Several are what you could call "easy listening". You know I like the rocking tunes but sometimes it's nice to have these softer things on.
well.
christmas is what? a week away??
& im not in the spirit.
at. all.
i've done all my shopping on-line
(books & videos for the grandkids)
& have sewn pj's for them....
& have had the presents wrapped since before thanksgiving.
the kids & their families will be arriving on christmas day.
we don't have a tree this year (again)
& for the first time i won't be doing stockings.
mrD went shopping today & got most of the food for the holidays.
& spirits... (i'm drinking amaretto & eggnog right now)
i'm not much on christmas music, really.
but i thought we should have some to get in the spirit of the season
manheim steamroller is tops on my list of preferred holiday tunes...
Some real mindbending happened in the later 60s...as some of us remember so well! And that bit about "if you remember the 60s, you weren't there", well, that's not true at all! It's some kind of anti-hippie propaganda.
The times, they a-changed in 1967. Here's a collection of crazy garage music and early psychedelia, culled from my memory and the wonderful world of youtube. Thanks, youtube! You've saved me late fees at my local movie store. I've got two I like. One is Clinton Street Video, a smallish store that has a very good selection of obscure music plus lots of Italian movies. The other is Movie Madness, a much larger place, whose owner goes to Hollywood auctions and stocks his display windows with Rita Moreno's nightie from West Side Story or Tony Curtis' flapper hat from Some Like It Hot. But I digress...
I was tempted to start with The Singing Nun, Bobby Vinton and such. Check out what the big hits of 1963 were! Sugar Shack, Surfin' USA (ok, that's 1 good one), The End of the World (by Skeeter Davis...a slow number), Rhythm of the Rain, He's So Fine, Blue Velvet (the bad one by Bobby Vinton), Hey Paula, Fingertips (that makes two good ones), Washington Square, Can't Get Used to Losing You (by Andy Williams!!), Dominique, I Will Follow Him...it was pretty dire. But really, why subject all of us to those songs? The important thing is, life changed in December 1963.
