Some of us are old...

Do you remember your first music-playing device, be it a record player, 8-track, cassette player, Walkman, CD player, or for our youngest Townspeople, mp3 player? Care to describe it? Does anything stand out in your memory about it?

I had a record player that was plastic, olive-green, and textured on the outside. Flip up the top and the plastic was off-white - also textured, to better pick up smudges from my dirty hands. The turntable itself was brown. I can't remember for sure if the arm was brown or off-white, but I remember my shakey hands were always challenged by lifting the arm onto a specific track. The cord was a 2-pronged brown affair. I experienced my first electric shock on that cord, leaving one of my fingers between the prongs as I plugged it in. Ouch!

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Have you heard of Lala.com? It's sort of a one-stop online music shopping/listening site. You can buy legal MP3s and the like. You can make playlists. I believe you can load your home MP3 library virtually, so you can listen to it on another computer without having to actually transfer all those gigabytes from one machine to another. Most enticingly for me, you can stream entire albums completely free, one time. It's a great way to sample an album you're thinking of buying. You can avoid a lot of unnecessary purchases this way.

Unfortunately, Apple bought Lala, and they're shutting it down. The site will cease to be on May 31, 2010. So I've been streaming a lot of music on there while I can, trying to plug in some of the gaps in my rock knowledge and just generally having some fun. Some of the things I've played:

• X's See How We Are and The Dream Syndicate's Medicine Show. These albums made me sad, and made me think about Bruce Springsteen's pernicious influence on rock 'n' roll over the years.
• The Mekons' Heaven and Hell. Good-to-great stuff.
• Unrest's Imperial f.f.r.r.. I actually went out and bought this after playing it.
• That Fall best-of from a few years ago. OK, I get it. This is the kind of thing I can get into, when I'm in the mood. But I don't see myself buying much Fall right now. I gotta be fiscally responsible these days.
• I think I also listened to some Embarassment and didn't like it as much as I thought it would.

Also, earlier in the year, I was listening to as much '80s Neil Young as I could find on the site: Re-ac-tor, Everybody's Rockin', Life, This Note's For You, etc. I want to pick up this project at some point this month and listen to a few more "weird Neil" albums, like the all-feedback Arc and that one about his electric car.

So suggest other albums/artists I should listen to on this site, Townsfolks. If it's any help, lately my tastes have veered towards dirty, noisy, smart indie rock with guitars. Have at it.

The People have (not) spoken!

Minor news - and the kind of personal report I would surely mock if one of you posted this first - but my iPod, which I'm running on shuffle, just spat out a segue of "All You Need Is Love," with the "She loves you..." coda, right into "She Loves You" itself. All Beatles on my iPod is burned from vinyl, so there can't be some "Genius" software at work.

I know some of you have long taken great pride in your mp3 player's random shuffle powers. Let this space be the place where you commemorate your player's most historic shuffles.

Last year, the Whos of Rock Town Hall's Whoville put together what was only, probably, the GREATEST CHRISTMAS RECORD OF ALL TIME!. There are still a ton of great Christmas songs out there, but beating 2008 will be hard to do. Here is the record, which was sequenced by The Great 48

1. "Santa Claus is Back In Town" -- Elvis Presley
2. "Run Rudolph Run" --Chuck Berry
3. "Little Saint Nick" -- The Beach Boys
4. "Christmas In Suburbia" -- Martin Newell
5. "Father Christmas" -- The Kinks
6. "Christmas Wrapping" -- The Waitresses
7. "Sleigh Ride" -- The Ventures
8. "Blue Christmas" -- Elvis Presley
9. "Fairytale of New York" -- The Pogues with Kirsty MacColl
10. "Please Come Home For Christmas" -- Charles Brown
11. "2000 Miles" -- Pretenders
12. "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" -- The Plastic Ono Band
13. "Jesus Christ" -- Big Star
14. "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" -- Darlene Love
15. "Christmas Time Is Here" -- Vince Guaraldi Trio

You know the rules by now. You nominate a song for inclusion. The moment another villager seconds your vote, it's in. We keep going until we have 15.

I was looking through a boxes of burned CDs looking for something (can't even remember WHAT I was looking for) and found the CD of Martin Newell's Greatest Living Englishman. It's been easily 10+ years since I listened to this disc (maybe because it was in with my "junk" cds and not in it's proper case...and also then did not make the great migration to the iPod in 2005).

I played it this moring and thought "How Did This LP Get Away?"

Do any Townspeople have a CD/LP/cassette that you totally forgot about, found, and wondered how you let it get away?

You may recall my unexpected gift of 50 bonus downloads from eMusic a couple of weeks ago. I was 9 selections into my bonus downloads when I realized that I couldn't figure out what to download next.

I'm constantly unimpressed with the indie rock selections eMusic suggests that I try, like all those bands with album covers featuring a folk-art painting of a sparrow perched on a branch. Man, that thumb-sucking, hushed-tones crap really needs to be banished to the same eternal $1 bins alongside discarded copies of Asylum Choir II.

Thanks for your suggestions. A couple of Townsmen suggested I add to my scant Sun Ra collection. Geo, I believe, recommended "Disco 3000," a long, swirling track that he thought would satisfy my late-blooming enjoyment of Krautrock. I downloaded it, and it's pretty good, but it started to lose me when it got into a '60s jazz trick that really turns me off: the "A Love Supreme"-style jazz chant! Some of the more concise tracks suggested by Geo and BigSteve, however, are very cool. Here's a cool Sun Ra track from Jazz In Silhouette. It reminds me of the fully arranged yet loose qualities I like in the music of Charles Mingus.

Sun Ra, "Enlightenment"

More goodies...after the jump!

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Is that all there is?

I guess for being an all-around good guy eMusic rewarded me with 50 bonus downloads that I need to use by the middle of November. These are on top of my standard 30 downloads/month. I've enjoyed my eMusic subscription over the last 2 years for enabling me to build a collection of mostly instrumental and foreign non-rock music that I otherwise would rarely take a chance on. For instance, I've been able to download everything available by one of my favorite minimalist musicians, Terry Riley, whose music I've been collecting since the pre-digital age. As for stuff I otherwise would have been reluctant to take a chance on you may recall my excitement over new additions to my collections, thanks primarily to eMusic: that Ethiopian stuff, Amon Düül 2...

I've downloaded just about that entire 20-CD collection of Ethiopian stuff and all of the Terry Riley I could get my hands on that I didn't already own. I may be crossing the line if I go any further than the four Amon Düül 2 (and one Amon Düül) records I've already dowloaded. The question for the Hall is, Where do I go next?

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Sleater-Kinney came up on the iPod today, and once again I had the same internal conflict that arises every time I hear them. I love the guitar playing, the songs, the drumming, the arrangements, the production, the guitar tones, and the overall sound. Plus, I love rooting for an underdog so a three-chick rock band with no bassist holding their own in a dude-heavy genre appeals to me. But I just can’t seem to make my peace with that voice.

On the old RTH, I recall someone suggesting that the reason some of us couldn’t handle the voice was because we were uncomfortable with strong women or some such nonsense. But I don't think that's the case. The voice sounds like Geddy Lee’s shrill younger sister to me. And I can’t stand his voice either.

I’m not giving up on them just yet because the good is really good, and I'm hoping this is one of those acquired taste things. But I’m not optimistic that I will be able to get over the hump on this.

Does anybody else have a band/artist that is otherwise perfect for them, but for a huge and possibly deal-breaking flaw?

As an aside, there’s also a great Last Man Standing here: Intra-band hook ups. Hell, Grace Slick could keep that going for weeks. SK would have been my trump card.

About 6 months ago now I started a thread that was a lot of fun. It was The Rock Town Hall Christmas Record. Participating in that heated debate was a good way for a newbie like me to get to know all the visitors to RTH, and it produced a tangible result; nothing less than the greatest Christmas record ever (not)made!

Over the past 6 months I have resisted the temptation to stretch this format to Valentine's Day, Groundhog Day, Arbor Day, MLK Day, Independence Day, or even my home country's beloved "May Two-Four", Victoria Day.

But here we are, hours before the official start of Summer. The time is right. The season is right. I summon the collective genius that voted, no insisted, that "Christmas In Suburbia" by Martin Newell secure its place underneath our trees. The genius that would happily hear "Jesus Christ" by Big Star with rum and egg-nog. That wouldn't dare tie a bow before they heard "Christmas Wrapping" by The Waitresses. I summon this collective brain to produce

The Rock Town Hall Sounds of Summer, Volume 1.

The Rock Town Hall Sounds of Summer is the 15 greatest songs about Rock and Roll's rightful season. Spring is for sissies. Girls wear too many clothes in The Fall. I'm Canadian...don't even talk to me about Winter. Only Summer truly Rocks.

You know the format. Nominate a song. When another Rock Town Hall member seconds that song, it's in!

To kick things off, I nominate "School's Out" by Alice Cooper

Is it just me, or is it getting Hot In Herre?

Exhausted?

It just occurred to me that I did not load a single track from Elvis Costello & The Attractions' Armed Forces onto my iPod. I love EC & The Attractions - everybody loves 'em - and Armed Forces is a strong record featuring some killer songs, but I rarely if ever feel the need to spin it. I've felt this way for most of the years that have followed the release of Get Happy!!, my all-time favorite album (period, not just among EC albums). I feel like I've got nothing to learn from Armed Forces. The arrangements lack mystery and unexplored nooks and crannies for me to stumble upon. The lyrics seem to have nothing more to reveal to me. I never found it to be a very emotional album, and what emotions I once felt for the album have long since passed from my daily routine (eg, "Party Girl"). It's a closed book. A very good book, but closed for me.

Do you have an album or albums like I've described, albums you know you like by artists you definitely like yet that you have zero interest in playing?