That’s right, I’m at it again with another Mystery Date! This one won’t be nearly as involved as the previous, as there isn’t much to say about this particular tune.
I’m not sure how good of a mystery this is, you won’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to crack it. At least three members of this band went on to other, more successful, musical enterprises. It won’t surprise me if your blind date ends at “Hello,” but try to stick it out a little bit. After all, you don’t want to hurt your Mystery Guest’s feelings, do you?
Give a listen – can you place the day, the time and any other details you care to note?
Well, well — Tom Petty has his first album ever to debut at #1 on the Billboard album chart. It’s a pretty low bar these days, and there are all kinds of tricks (like giving away album downloads when you buy a concert ticket) but, hell yes! #1 baby! Clapton comes in at #2 with his JJ Cale tribute. What is this? 1977?
Petty’s “Hypnotic Eye” sounds OK by me — I have not listened to it 50 times yet — but I’m liking it. Also this week, Spoon put out a new one that seems promising for the long haul. Jenny Lewis has a nice new album that I probably will listen to 50 times at some point this year.
So — I’m pretty optimistic about R-O-C-K-ers (yeah, of a certain age) right now.
As a teenager I couldn’t fall asleep without listening to music. Every night I’d pop in a cassette of one of those King Biscuit Flower Hour concerts I’d recorded off the radio and rock myself to sleep while studying the details of how the Attractions, for instance, could skillfully bring it down behind Elvis Costello on “Motel Matches” and then burst back into the fore with a Pete Thomas snare hit. Or the way Patti Smith Group could sloppily plow their way through their cover of “My Generation” with not an ounce of finesse or style that the Who brought to the original. It didn’t matter that they sounded like they were winging it. Smith barked out the lyrics as if possessed. I imagined the guys in the band unleashing shit-eating grins after an hour-long set dedicated to the noble effort of performing silted originals that awkwardly attempted to graft Smith’s free verse poetry to musical variations of Them’s “Gloria,” their keynote cover song. As a practicing musician, I knew from experience the thrill of sloppily running through those garage-band classics.
I had to keep my cassette tape collection fresh, so once a week I’d load up a blank cassette and tape the latest King Biscuit concert off WMMR, excluding the monthly forays into up-and-coming Corporate Rock bands like Journey. WIOQ occasionally featured a newly released, vaguely New Wave album. One month I taped both a live concert and the second album by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. They seemed like a New Wave band even the traditional stoner dudes could grasp. For younger readers, I should note, the practice of taping music off the radio was the equivalent of downloading music illegally. We were the first generation to kill the record industry.
In terms of listening to music for the purpose of falling asleep, an especially counterproductive practice occurred on Sunday nights, when I tuned into the University of Pennsylvania’s WXPN for a low-wattage broadcast of Yesterday’s Now Music Today, hosted by someone named Lee Paris. I don’t recall how I stumbled across this underground show. Paris had none of the insider cool of the FM DJs I’d been getting accustomed to. He got nowhere near backstage with the Boss or Jackson Browne. He had no time for the Stones. His enthusiasm and sense of wonder were more in tune with the early ‘70s AM DJs I grew up with, but he lacked their concise professionalism and compressed, booming tone. He raved about the new music he was playing and the underground bands passing through Philadelphia’s small clubs. He likely chatted up some of these bands, but he never gave the impression that he was a confidante of the artists, the way one legendary WIOQ DJ, in particular, did when dropping tales of his latest encounter with the Boss or Billy Joel.
Greetings, all. Sorry for coming back after a long hiatus with a bit of a bummer, but — did any of you guitar-pop fans know that Will Owsley died a few years ago? And that he killed himself? I don’t know why, but this one hurt a little bit more than I expected.
Back in the mid-’90s, townsman Mockcarr and I enjoyed discovering the decade’s few truly good albums and artists in the “power-pop” genre, and our voyage of discovery pointed us in the direction of Owsley’s truly excellent eponymous debut album. In an era that predated any meaningful internet discovery, finding something like it — an album about which one could basically find no additional information — was a real moment, and you couldn’t help but take a kind of music nerd pride in having unearthed it. Owsley, and The Grays, and Jon Brion’s first solo album, and Aimee Mann’s “Whatever” — those were discs that *we* found, and artists that *I* pimped among my fellow fans of meticulously crafted, guitar-centric songwriting.
Now I find out that Owsley is dead, at his own hand. He never recaptured the spirit of his excellent first album again (I believe he had two albums that came out after it), but the fact that it still exists as a shining example of what an obsessive, home-recording, pop songsmith can do when he sets his mind to it, makes me happy. Thanks, Will. You will be missed.
We all know of some famous musical families: the Cash-Carters, the Marleys, the Coltranes, the Bachs and the Bachmans. Our Mystery Date comes to us from a lesser-known musical family, the Dinnings, whose musical legacy spans genres from jazz to country-western and bluegrass to rock’n’roll. It is also clear that their musical talent is accompanied by a dose of entrepreneurial spirit. Somehow, this subject piqued my interest, leading me to cobble together crumbs of information found on various web sites, so I cannot guarantee accuracy. Despite all I have found, I still know pretty much nothing about the Mystery Date herself, Sherry Dinning, and her song “Obion Bottom Land.” Who knows, maybe a member of the family will find this post and give us a bit more detail, correct some errors or even send us some music? What I do know is that Sherry is a member of the Dinning family… have you never heard of them? Maybe you know some of their music, read on.
By playing guitar for Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, KISS, and most especially on Lou Reed’s Rock ‘n Roll Animal, this guy had an immeasurable yet under-the-radar impact on me during my musically formative years. He was a GREAT man.
