Abbey Road
A mostly forgotten record from a otherwise consistent rock outfit called The Beatles. The record looks in good shape, though the jacket's a bit faded. To my mind, there is simply nothing better than Side 2 of Abbey Road. I have many fond memories and associations with this album, but here's something that happened to me quite recently: I was heading out at about 8:30 on a Friday a couple weeks ago and was standing at the bus stop on Fulton at Park Presidio when a woman in a car pulls up to the stoplight. She's singing along and bopping around to unknown music in her car, and I think that's cool, so we make eye contact and I smile at her. Then she offers me a ride. I hopped in and she took me 20 blocks down the road. She was cool and her name was Cordelia and she actually asked me directions to her destination in Cole Valley (maybe that's why she offered the ride?) It felt like an exciting, San Francisco-y experience, but the best part was that once I got in the car, I realized she had been rocking out to that section in between "Carry That Weight" and "The End" where Ringo is soloing and things are sort of peaking. Nice.
Headhunters - Herbie Hancock
Take note, burgeoning musicians. Perhaps you'd like to learn to improvise? Perhaps you've tried recording lengthy sections of yourself playing through a chord progression so that you can subsequently learn to improvise over it, but find it painstaking, and never lasting long enough? Track 1 of Headhunters is for you. "Chameleon" is a 17 minute stone groove: perfect for soloing/spacing out over. I learned a lot from this track.
Headhunters and John Scofield's A-Go-Go were on almost constant repeat when I was living with Tom and Phil in college.
Cosmo's Factory - CCR
I was pretty stoked about this one, and listened to it right away. I'm a longtime CCR fan, but hadn't actually heard this record in full. It's got tons of awesome tunes on it (Traveling Band, Who'll Stop the Rain, Run Through the Jungle, and Looking Out My Back Door) It occurs to me this moment that, based on this track list, one can assume that Cosmo's is The Dude's "creedence tape". Boss. I also really like this cover photo, as it gives you a glimpse into the sometimes sorry and typically un-glamorous (although occasionally tons of fun) life of the rehearsal space. Having thought/wrote that, I looked it up on Wikipedia and here's a telling paragraph:
The name of the album comes from the warehouse in Berkeley where the band rehearsed. Bandleader John Fogerty was so insistent on practicing (nearly every day) that drummer Doug "Cosmo" Clifford began referring to the place as "the factory"
Damn, that sounds soul-crushingly familiar slash really awesome. I didn't even know they were from the bay.
I also got an old Kris Kristofferson, a compilation of George Gershwin stuff, and Traffic's "Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys." I need some special shelves for all these discs. I listened to Rhapsody in Blue, and I felt like I knew it primarily from it's use on Simpsons episodes. Modern youth, eh? This strikes me as akin to watching Casablanca and recognizing much of the script as a series of Bugs Bunny lines. But hey, culture is culture. At least I recognized it.
why not take all of me?
rob
