I’m seeing reports that New York punk impresario Marty Thau has died at 75. Official reports are far and few between, however, in this electronic age, in which almost anyone who’s ever striven to be anyone merits a flurry of “he/she was a great (wo)man…” tributes. I cannot sincerely attest to the greatness of Marty Thau, but he seemed like an interesting person around whom cool artists gathered. He seemed at least as interesting as that spoken-word 1-hit wonder poet Maggie Estes, who sadly passed away at the age of 50 and who had a fling with MTV in the early ’90s, so let’s give it up for Marty Thau.
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This anti-spam plugin we use blocks good-guys every now and then like this. Doesn’t/shouldn’t happen very often. Meanwhile it blocks over 8000 spammers every month. Let us know if you ever suffer this problem. You will be added to the whitelist and that should take care of it. Thanks.
Musically speaking, what’s your favorite waste of time? Is it tracking down every Hendrix bootleg regardless of how shitty they sound? Or, fruitless searching on YouTube for clips of The Stone Roses live at Spike Island. Is it annoying record store clerks with requests for every copy of Yesterday..And Today that comes through the door? Arguing with Misterioso?
Spotted and bagged one a few days back while I was huntin’ on The You Tube. It come up over a marsh as an “ad” and as baggin’ ad-type rocks is a piece a piss I normly bail out as this is jest cleanskin for junior Rock Hunters. But I was bit gobsmacked by this ‘un. Not enough to let loose a “Holy dooley!” but stuffed, I’ll be I was. Enjoy my kill mates.
I caught the tail end of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s “Born to Run” while flipping channels on the radio this morning. Have you ever heard that song? In the middle, there’s a instrumental breakdown before The Boss counts the band back into the final verse: 1-2-3-! When I was a teen, first trying to get my head around this phenomenon and trying to find other Springsteen songs that matched the excitement of “Born to Run,” I kept coming back to that count-off. I’m sure, with 82 zillion hours of live performances under their belt (over the course of just a single year of touring) that the band didn’t really need their leader to count them back into the grand finale of the song, but it’s exciting nevertheless. For a 14-year-old boy, or whatever I was, trying to get his head into the mechanisms of how real rock ‘n rollers conduct their business, it was a peak behind the Wizard’s curtain. From that point forward I could become aware of other studio recordings that used the count-off/count-in device, a device that in most cases could have been excised from the final recording, but I guess the artists thought it was as cool to document as teenage me did.
This week’s Last Man Standing does not threaten to be a stingy one. Quite the opposite. As we seek studio recordings including count-offs/count-ins, only a few rules apply:
Live recordings are excluded.
All Ramones recordings are excluded, including studio ones, because that could be too easy.
Songs that happen to include a counting device that’s not related to instructing the band to the song’s tempo do not count (so hold your “All Together Now” and “1-2-Crush on You” entries, Beatles and Clash fans).
As always, your Moderator reserves the right to include new rules as needed.
So “Born to Run” is off the table. Let the studio recordings that begin with count-ins and include count-offs at other points follow!
To celebrate Valentine’s Day—and truly, love is worth celebrating every day of the year—share your saddest duet with us, a romantic pairing not meant to last the test of time.
I’m stuck working from home during a snowstorm…again. I bet people in manly, cold-weather towns like Chicago and Minnesota don’t spend every snow day holed up working from home. Not that I dislike working from home, but there’s something to be said for getting a shower and getting out of my sweats.
With no tremendous topic to put forth, I ask you: What are you listening to, right now?
I’m presently listening to nothing, although that will change shortly.
