Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited

I was really looking forward to this one, so it's a shame it was so badly scratched. It's the first album I've found that I actually tried to play that, after listening to it, I don't think I'd be able to play again. There's a big ugly nick right in the middle of Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues and other skips and scratches all over the record.

This was the first Dylan album I owned, on CD, and at the time it was my favorite. That didn't change until I got my copy of Bringing It All Back Home which is still my favorite, and which, fortunately, plays just fine.

Still, Highway 61 is a classic and I don't feel like my collection would be complete without a copy, so I'll have to seek one out. At least the jacket is in pretty good shape. I could always frame it and throw it up on the wall.

[wikipedia]

The Beatles - Beatles VI

Ok so the real reason I'm playing the Beatles and drinking is because I'm kind of bummed out about... what the fuck?

This is a thing that happens? What the shit? Okay, so... first track on either side won't play. That is... well established.

Um. God damn. Track two on side one is a classic. God damn. Side two is scratched to all fuck. Gonna go ahead and blame the condition of this record on my crazy ex-stepfather because: fuck that guy anyway.

Uh. Yeah. I'll probably never play this again. It's fucked. "Eight Days A Week" plays great. But look at this. Shit.

Holy crap, this one has "Dizzy Miss Lizzy!"

My ex-wife and her dad were really into the Beatles. She considered this her theme song. It didn't work out with me and her. Me calling her my ex and all, you probably figured that out.

Crazy. Yeah, man, I don't know.

The way music works on my memory, sometimes it's really good. Sometimes, not so much. I'm so much happier and healthier than I was when she and I were together.

It's still a bummer that it didn't work out, a bummer that we even tried, that we wasted all that time trying so hard. Looking back, it's easy to say the relationship was bad for both of us. Looking forward, from the beginning, who could have predicted? Other than everyone, I mean.


Anyway, I'm in a better place now. I hope she is too.

[wikipedia]

The Beatles - Rubber Soul

Last week when I was googling Dylan lyrics to send to my friend Larra as a joke that only I thought was funny, I found this article about a song Dylan wrote about John Lennon. It was an interesting read and it mentioned Norwegian Wood which is on this album. I love that song and I haven't heard it for a long time so I pulled this out of the stack and gave it a listen.

It's a good album. It's scratched all to hell. I mean, just awful. Oddly, it plays just fine. So anyway it's a decent album and if I ever find myself in the mood to listen to Norwegian Wood I'll play it again. The rest of the songs on it are okay. None of them are my favorites. It's got In My Life on it which makes my mom cry every time she hears it. But that's not much of a distinction. Lots of things make her cry. Car commercials make her cry.

Anyway: good album, scratched so badly it looks like it was used as a cat toy, plays just fine anyway.

Incidentally, there's probably gonna be a ton of Beatles and Stones on the blog coming up, partially because I want to see which I have more of, and partially because they're all stacked up together and I want to get through them and move on to other stuff.

[wikipedia]

Bob Dylan - Bringing It All Back Home

Played this one last week some time. I've just been so busy with school I haven't been able to update the blog. I'm so glad this semester is almost over.

At any rate, when I was young, probably right around the age I was when I still thought Catcher in the Rye was great, well before I realized Holden Caulfield was just a douche,  I started listening to Bob Dylan. This was one of the first two albums I listened to. Guess what the other one was. Go ahead. Guess. I'll wait.

Correct: Highway 61 Revisited.

They are both great albums. I still like Dylan. I probably like him more now than I did when I was old enough to have realized that everyone was wrong about everything, but not yet old enough to have realized I was too.

[wikipedia]

The Beatles - HELP!

So what I had been doing was posting the pics and the descriptions and my thoughts and what not in the order that I unpacked them and took their pictures, roughly, more or less. But I got a turntable the other day and I finally got it hooked up. I can't clean them and play them in the order I unpacked them because they don't all have inner sleeves. I don't want to clean them and play them until I can put them away properly and I can't do that without an inner sleeve which they don't all have. I ordered some online but they haven't come yet. What all this needless detail that probably no one is ever going to read amounts to is, now I'm going through them basically at random, pulling albums that look interesting, making sure they're in relatively decent shape, have sleeves, cleaning them, and playing them. So. None of this matters and I should probably delete it but I'm not going to.

Anyway, the first album I cleaned up and played was HELP! by the Beatles which would make my mom proud. I probably ought to tell her. I guess I will eventually. Anyway, it had some minor scratches but it played just fine. The cover had some mildew on it that I cleaned up. I cleaned the album, got it to play. My little boy James loved it. He was going around in circles playing with his trucks humming a little tune while I sat and watched him and listened to the music my parents played when I was his age doing the same thing. I'm all verklempt.

[wikipedia]

Down Memory Lane: 65 Years of Song Hits

So I found this:

which is full of these:

And it also had this in there:

So Reader's Digest collected a bunch of music for old people from back when my mom was young. I don't expect to find it thrilling. Stashed in there though, is this Christmas album. It's scratched all to fuck. I don't expect it to play at all ever. The weird thing is though, what the hell is my mom doing hanging onto a Christmas record? She hates Christmas. For one thing, she's jewish. That's no big deal. She's not a bigot about it or anything but it's not as if she grew up waiting for Santa to show up every year.

But even worse, her mom died right around Christmas. My mom was young when it happened. It shook up the whole family really badly. By all accounts she was the best thing about the family. Everyone loved her. Even my dad who doesn't have a vested interest in pretending to like a mother-in-law from someone he's not married to anymore only ever has good things to say about her. I never met her. I wasn't even conceived yet when she died. 

It's weird growing up with a grandparent you never met who everyone loved and talks about a lot. I wish I could have met her. I think maybe my kid has a touch of that with my grandfather. He died before I even met my wife. He died back when I was still married to my first wife. So my kid's never gonna meet him. But there's a picture of him in my hallway.

Every night before we tuck James into bed, we have this routine. It ends with a bedtime story, but it starts with him brushing his teeth in the bathroom at the end of the hall. The hallway is lined with pictures of family. So as he's walking from the bathroom to his bedroom, James waves at the pictures and says goodnight to them all. "Goodnight mommy, goodnight daddy, goodnight Auntie Leah, goodnight Auntie Johanna..." and on and on. So every night he says goodnight to this black and white picture of my grandfather. "Goodnight, Grampa Crab." That's what everyone called him, Crab. I never got the same story twice so I don't know how he got the nickname. But my kid says goodnight to this old guy who we all loved an awful lot who he never actually met. It's sweet. It's also a little strange. 

If you had to choose two adjectives to describe my family, those would be good ones: sweet and strange.

I miss my grandfather. Toward the end of his life we lived pretty far apart so I hardly ever got to see him. I do wish I had more time with him. And I wish I had gotten to meet my maternal grandmother. I wish I had more than stories to go on with her. But the stories are pretty good. And the stories I'll tell my kid about my grandfather are pretty good too.

So that went and got pretty long and sappy for a description of a collection of old songs I'm never gonna listen to.

Come to think of it, that's a pretty good description of this entire blog. 

The Lovin' Spoonful - Do You Believe In Magic

Nah, I don't believe in magic. Know what I believe? I believe this band is a perfect example of why people hate white people. I mean, you know, this and slavery. Anyway, check it. According to wikipedia:

When asked about his band, leader John Sebastian said it sounded like a combination of "Mississippi John Hurt and Chuck Berry", prompting his friend, Fritz Richmond, to suggest the name "Lovin' Spoonful" from a line in Hurt's song, "Coffee Blues".

So these a-holes took this, threw in some of this, and came up with THIS.

The state rests.

Setting aside for a moment, the good time music of the Lovin' Spoonful, what's this on the back?

"This album belongs to me, Sharon Levin - I put a scratch in it and payed you $2.50 for it.-"

Then a red squiggle. Is the red squiggle an autograph? Maybe. She chased the Beatles all the way to Liverpool to get their autographs. But I'm not under the impression she gave that much of a damn about the Lovin' Spoonful. And it's pretty squiggly. Also I'm not that lucky. I'm not a fan of these tools and I'd sell this thing in a heartbeat if it was worth anything. So it's probably not.

But the note. Who the hell is the note to?

"This belongs to me, I put a scratch in it."
Great. It's yours. Scratch it right the fuck up like you did to the rest of your records. Why are you telling me this?

"I paid you $2.50 for it."
One, you paid too much. Two, again, who wants to know this?

If it belonged to you and you put a scratch in it, you already paid for it... I don't understand the context or the purpose of this note. Maybe she was selling it back to a used record place. Maybe she still has it because they didn't want it because she scratched it up. Maybe I'm overthinking this.

[wikipedia]

The Rolling Stones - Out Of Our Heads

Alright, let's see what we got here. "The Last Time" and "Satisfaction". Huh. There's a shitload of Rolling Stones albums here but they all legitimately have at least one or two incredible songs on them.

[wikipedia]

The Rolling Stones - December's Children (and everybody's)

Here we go, back to the good stuff. About god damn time.

[wikipedia]

Tom Rush - Tom Rush (1965)

Those things will kill you, Tom. What? He's still alive? Fuck it. I'm picking the habit back up.

Donovan - Fairy Tale

My mom liked to write her name on a lot of these albums. My dad too. I don't remember ever doing that with CDs. I don't know what the deal is.

The Kinks - Kinda Kinks

I dunno. I like the Kinks, but mostly the songs everyone has heard of. I don't recognize the names of any of the songs on this one. Name's "kinda" dumb. I blame their management, about which I know nothing. Moving on.

The Kinks - Kinks-Size

BOOM. It wasn't all hearts and butterflies in the 60's. Fuckin' BOOM.