Sounds of the hall in roughly 33 1/3 minutes!
Despite some mildly scary stuff, there is little to fear about tonight’s episode. No Gordon Lightfoot, I assure you.
[Note: You can add Saturday Night Shut-In episodes to your iTunes by clicking here. The Rock Town Hall feed will enable you to easily download Saturday Night Shut-In episodes to your digital music player.]
Playlist after the jump
In the recent discussion of the music of Gordon Lightfoot, I made a reference to Jackson C. Frank, who released only 1 album, which was produced by Paul Simon (whose birthday just happened to pass).
The album leads off with his song, “Blues Run the Game.”
Although this song mentions the blues, it is not a blues song in its structure or style. But the blues do run this particular game of Last Man Standing: How many songs can we name that are about, or mention, the blues, although they are not actually in that genre? I can think of 4. Let’s see if you all can name those songs and more.
Trying to kickstart some action here: Name a song with the word “action” (or a compound thereof) in the title.
I’ll start it off with this one – Elvis Costello’s “No Action.”
Following my initial Facebook posting of my thoughts on Neil Young last night, which became the basis of today’s brief concert review, cdm picked up on my reference to Neil’s cover of the excellent Gordon Lightfoot song “If You Can Read My Mind” and said (offlist) something to the effect of,
I’m particularly glad to hear that Neil is a fan of the ‘foot.
If I were a normal person, I would have let that comment stay on the record without comment. That’s what nice, normal people do. I’m not at least one of those two things. Instead, I said something to the effect of,
It was helpful for me to be reminded that Gordon Lightfoot actually wrote a great song. I have not understood the Genius of Lightfoot cult that’s developed over the last 15 years. “Sundown” is kind of cool, but I also grew up chuckling at it and still do. That other hit of his, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” is Blood, Sweat & Tears/Billy Joel’s sea shanty bad. What am I missing?
This led to the type of back and forth we used to come to expect in the Halls of Rock, with cdm and other FB friends posting examples of other “great” Lightfoot songs and me shooting them down with statements like,
I don’t know, that Hokey Macho way he sings does nothing for me. It’s like the Brawny paper towels guy came to life as a singer-songwriter.
Our old friend saturnismine backed me up with a one-liner that topped anything I’d been able to articulate:
Last night my wife and I went to see Neil Young at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music. We got an invitation earlier this week from old friends. It was a great show: all acoustic, great sampling of all that’s great and even occasionally larger-than-life lousy about Neil (eg, a didactic, 2-song “Environmental Hymns” set that Neil of October 2014 clearly felt compelled to perform). His between-song banter was really funny. He played one of my favorite Buffalo Springfield songs (“On the Way Home”), surprisingly made a cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind” (see clip, above, from his Boston show a few nights earlier) his own, and then some. The guy was all THERE: his songs, his performance of them, etc. We had some great laughs and bad pizza with our friends after the show. I went home feeling really good about the world.
One of my close, personal Facebook friends posted this clip on his feed today. I watch this every other year or so, which indicates how often I watch Beatles- and Lennon-related documentaries, not just this clip in particular. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t particularly attracted to the cult-worshiping aspects of this scene:
This footage never fails to give me chills – on many levels. What’s really got me going now is the link I followed from the YouTube posting to a Dick Cavett appearance of, possibly, the same guy. If that’s in fact the same guy you’ve got to wonder what was going through his mind when Mark David Chapman completed his twisted act of fandom.
As I was trying to forget the Nationals’ 18-inning crusher of a loss the other night, I caught up on some old email accounts and see that iTunes has picked four post-Beatles songs for a free download. They chose:
Not bad, but can Rock Town Hall do better than iTunes? My challenge “To You”: What are some of your favorite deep cuts from the Fab Four after the breakup?
