What are you listening to? The world really needs to know. #7 (2 Viewers)

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Count Ossie & the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari - Grounation

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It's perfect late at night, early in the morning, any time of day.

I understand it may be an acquired taste, but if you're in the right frame of mind (however you get there) it can take you places.


 
The second one sounds like a lot of the music (jazz? Free jazz? Loft jazz? Pick a label...) I listen to from the late '60s early, '70s. Very nice.
 
Yeah, that record is 1973, so it makes sense. You can hear that they were listening to what was happening at the time with The Last Poets and The Watts Prophets and all those guys, but they made their own Jamaican version of that and tied it in with the Nyabinghi drumming tradition to come up with something unique.
 
A bit of German "Gangsta Rap" for you ... one can think about this whatever you want but this beat is killer imo.

 
Went to a mojito contest/party this past weekend. I bartended the best mojitos and won a bottle of good rum. After some drinking the wife and a bunch of us sat around passing back and forth the guitar playing songs late into the nite, mostly Irish folk songs 'cause the one woman's parents are from Ireland and my wife's interpretations were blowing minds. Good times.


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I made a flyer for a show we did with The Replacements once (a few days or a week(?) after Take Out the Trash came out) that had our name and picture taking up the top half of the page and a smaller picture of them underneath, so it looked like they were opening for us when it was really the other way around. I thought it was hilarious, but their management (Peter at the record store) failed to see the humor in it and threw the 500 copies we dropped off at the record store into the trash.

No one in the band ever said anything about it to us, but I know Paul and Tommy saw them, so I always assumed they either thought it was funny or just didn't give a shit (likely the latter). Or maybe they didn't mention it because we all carried knives and they didn't. I don't know. ;)

It was a great show though. It was about 500 degrees in the club and I wore a top hat. Because you can never be too classy when you're playing at a place called Goofy's Upper Deck.
 
Went down a Replacements rabbit hole. Shiftless gets me every time.

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(The Replacements - Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take... 1981 (full album 2002))
 
Do you have a copy of said flyer...
Oh, I might...

I have a copy of everything, I was the printer. We had a flyer or poster or printed page for everything, courtesy of my "after hours work" at the Northland Financial insurance company.

Other bands thought we were rich, because they'd tape two dozen xeroxes in windows around town and we'd drop a hundred offset printed flyers at every venue and record store in a 50 mile radius.

For one show we did we had a main show flyer and four separate flyers, one for each band member. I printed two reams of each (an entire case of paper, 5,000 sheets) and we wheat pasted them on every square inch of Downtown Minneapolis. A friend of mine said he still saw little scraps of them here and there 10 years later...

our name and picture taking up the top half of the page and a smaller picture of them underneath...
My memory deceives me yet again. It wasn't their picture that was smaller, it was their name. Ha. Same effect.

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Also, looking up the date tells me it was 1982, not 1981, so Take Out The Trash had been out for half a year or so, but they hadn't yet put out their second record, Stink.

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So was that before Gary Cherone joined? Seriously, that is awesome. If I saw that flyer in the late 80's my little rock n' roll teenage mind would have exploded. The Mats were mythical to me, even though I saw them as they were a faded version of the myth opening for Tom Petty.
 
The Mats were mythical to me...
It's weird when your "local" bands become famous, or even just cult famous.

I got an email from a guy who is doing liner notes for a Husker Du compilation or something, wanting "stories from the old days," and I just wondered what the hell I could tell him that a hundred other people couldn't?

In the early 80s I just keep thinking things like, "Why are those guys from Goofy's on Saturday Night Live?" ;)

Seems like here in Los Angeles or in New York you kind of expect people will get famous, or you aren't surprised when some band that played at the Roxy or the Whisky two weeks ago is on TV.

But somehow, I don't know, bands from Minneapolis or St. Paul? It was weird. Watching Prince blow up was very weird, because he was very weird, and his music back then was weird. I'd be lying if I said I saw that coming.
 
So it's not a stretch to assume you opened or played along side Soul Asylum and Husker Du?
 
Yes, but Soul Asylum was called Loud Fast Rules. They sucked (then and later).

But anyone who played in the twin cities in those days played with all those bands. There weren't a lot of us. Maybe a dozen bands at that time. By the time I left town, in 1984, there must have been a hundred "punk" bands. Or "new wave" or whatever they were calling it before someone in a marketing department came up with the "alternative" tag.

Speaking of playing with bands that became famous, we opened for REM in Madison Wisconsin, and they wouldn't let us in the dressing room. I'd never been kept out of a dressing room at a bar gig. Ha ha.They were star-tripping and they only had one single out, so I can't imagine they were much more fun when they got famous.

There was competition between bands, for sure, but really, there was more of a spirit of camaraderie in those days. It wouldn't occur to us - or anyone - to not let another band on the show use the dressing room. The Replacements didn't lock us out of the dressing room at Duffy's - Bob walked around in his underwear and shared his giant bag of McDonald's with us. We used the Stinson basement for rehearsals a few times. Other bands used our rehearsal space in the building across the parking lot from First Avenue.

No one was a star, we were all in the same boat. You'd be watching some punk band in the 7th St. Entry, and there would be 20 people there, but you'd turn around and Prince would be standing there. Or a writer from one of the half dozen weekly papers. It was really a small scene and no one acted like they owned it. Probably because there was no money (yet). There's no point in cutting the next guy's throat if there's nothing to gain from it.

But since REM set the tone for the day at that Madison show, we ended up just endlessly tormenting them. Well, Mort and I did. We sat at the bar during their sound check and yelled, "Well that one sucks!" after every song. The drummer approached us later - trying to be friendly, I guess - saying, "Who's got the pot?" But it was too late for that, and we found the question particularly preposterous (only hippies smoked pot), so we mocked him for the rest of the night. Every 20 minutes or so we'd look for him and go walk past him, saying in loud Cheech and Chong voices, "Who's got the pot, maaaaan?"

Childish, yes, but I didn't wind up in a punk band because I was well behaved and enjoyed following the rules. The rules and the uniforms and the death of it all came later, but by then I was long gone.

That's a long answer to a short question. That's what happens when you get old, I guess.

Oh oh, here comes grandpa with his war stories again - run away! Run away!
 
Husker DU's first album was brilliant. That melodic chain saw sound. I remember I was working in the record store and kept playing the song New Day Rising over and over again saying. What is this shit. Next day I did it again and said you got to here this to everyone who came in. The most common statement was I don't know if I hate it or like it. By then I knew I did.
 
Land Speed Record was 1st? Oh, and admittedly I did like Soul Asylum for a while. They do have some great songs. But being critical? They were def a lesser Replacements. Pirner seems annoying. Dan Murphy seems like a nice enough guy. Never Really Been and Cartoon I like. Cartoon is also the first song of theirs I heard & could play.



Funny. Going down a youtube rabbit hole I discovered the Unplugged session of theirs. A few friends (one who worked at a radio station who has since died.) are in the front row. Weird. And sooo not as good as I remembered.
 
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One of my favourite blues singers, Karen Dalton
I just bought Cotton Eyed Joe, a double cd which was recorded live in Boulder in 1962.
I highly recommended it. Couldn't find anything from the double cd on youtube .
But here is one from another album.

 
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So was that before Gary Cherone joined?
Oy. I was the double bassist in Houndstooth with Gary Cherone as vocalist in 1996 (post Extreme). We did one gig and one recording session. The gig was the Dicks, Dykes and Fairies Ball in June 1996 at some big club in the Fenway area of Boston (don't remember the name; FTW!). He grew up in a typical Italian home with Frank Sinatra as a hero and we did Frank tunes with a big ole edge. We absolutely nailed it. My 15 minutes. But wait...we did a recording session at Sound Techniques a few days later and laid down a solid, massively swinging jazz version of Dream On (I shit you not). We were to play the opening of the Hard Rock in Boston with Aerosmith and then Gary got a call from some guy named Eddie.

I went back to the stool grind. I'm still there.
 
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