John Cougar - American Fool

"Little ditty, 'bout..." SHUT THE FUCK UP. Oh my god, seriously? I don't hate this guy. But for me, this is music to roll your eyes to.

I... mean... god... damn...

Big teased hair, popped collar on your strategically worn out denim jacket... just... oh, 1980s, how you hurt me so.

Speaking of which! Story time!

The Cars - Candy-O

Another Cars album. Think I only have the two. It's a good record. I didn't recognize any of the song titles but I remembered the songs when I heard them. I like the Cars okay. They aren't one of my favorite bands but they have a lot of good songs and they were on heavy rotation on MTV back before it started to suck. Record was in great shape. Plays great. Jacket's good. Probably the best all around condition of anything I've played so far which is a god damned shame considering I can't get Highway 61 to play. So. Moving right along.

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The Band - The Band

Oh, man. What a great album. This is one of those records that, right from the first track, all the way through the end, is just awesome. This was one of my dad's favorite bands back in the day. Probably still is, even though he mostly listens to a lot of stuff from before he was born now. When you get old, you start to listen to old people music, apparently.

Guess that's kind of what I'm doing. Dammit...

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.

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The Beatles - Hey Jude

The original title of Hey Jude was The Beatles Again, which pretty much sums up the way I feel about this album. I can't believe how many Beatles records there are in this stack. I'm played so many and I still have like, four or five left. Most of them are early, but I do have the White Album still to go. I think I'm leaving that one for last.

This cleaned up. Played just fine. No major scratches. Jacket's a wreck. Don't really care about the jackets though so whatever.

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The Beatles - Let It Be

Let It Be. The last album they made. They hated each other by the end. Aw, man. I thought these silly happy hippy fucks would cheer me up but listening to this album, thinking about their silly horseshit, it bums me out. All you need is love. They loved each other. Wasn't enough, was it? Were they ever not full of shit? I dunno man. On to the next one. Only got... half a fucking dozen left. How many albums did these assholes make? God damn. Nothing if not prolific, these well-intentioned hypocrites.

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The Beatles - Revolver

So like I started saying in the last post, other than the fact that I really want to work my way through all this Beatles and get to something else, the real reason I'm playing the Beatles, other than the fact that I'd like to get them all done, is that they're some cheerful motherfuckers and I'm kind of bummed about the way CUNY has been treating me. But fuck those guys anyway.

The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night

Okay, so, I'm playing through all the Beatles stuff I haven't played today. I have a stack of the Beatles, and a stack of the Stones and another stack of Bob Dylan that I'd like to complete before I start digging through all the other weird shit. I'm doing the Beatles first because I like to save the best for last. HA! Suck it BEATLES! Ah whatever. Most of it's good.

There are some really weird like, lounge or bossa nova versions of some Beatles tunes on this. Man... just weird.

I live in Brooklyn, weed capitol of NYC and I don't have a connection. How sad is that? Listening to this I wish I was hanging with my sister, smoking a doob, listening to this silly shit. Ah well. Next time I see her, I guess.

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Moby Grape - Moby Grape

Screw it. Let's try one from the "Hippy Stuff" pile. Moby Grape? What the hell? Aw, fuck it. Other than my faith in the basic goodness of my fellow man and my will to live, what have I got to lose? This one was my mom's, has her name on it. Let's see what happens when I play it.

Kinda scratched up, but I've seen enough of these banged up platters to know superficial scratches when I see them.

...holy crap. Two songs in, this is pretty good. Two songs in this is really very good. The first song sounds kind of like a themesong for a TV show. Like a Monkees song, but in a good one. The second one is straight up blues rock. I wouldn't walk out of a bar if these guys were playing.

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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.

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The Beatles - Yesterday and Today

Yay, more Beatles. If you're starting to get tired of entries about the Beatles, you're starting to get the picture of what my childhood was like. I know I just wrote this long nostalgic post about Abbey Road. I also said they weren't my favorite band, just that they were always around. This one cleaned up okay. It had a really ugly scratch right in the middle of "We Can Work It Out" which I thought would not only cause it to skip, but might knock the needle all the fuck over the record. I hovered over the turntable ready to lift the needle the second that happened. But it didn't. It played right through it. Very minor skip once every 1.8 seconds through the second half of the song. That was it. The rest of the album played pretty good.

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Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run

The thing about Springsteen is that if you're from Jersey, you love him.

The Beatles - Abbey Road

Ah, man. Well, Abbey Road is just the holy grail, isn't it?

Tom Waits - Nighthawks at the Diner

So this one cleaned up nicely and plays well. I like Tom Waits. But I like old creepy The Black Rider, Tom Waits, not young, hip, witty Tom Waits. This is cool and all and I might play it at a party for background. I don't think I'd ever play it on my own. Nice live double album though and it's in pretty good shape so that's cool. I just really prefer Tom Waits' work from after he embraced the dark side of the force. This is from before.

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Hall & Oates - Private Eyes

Couple things. One: My mom claims to be a Beatlemaniac. But judging by the condition of her Beatles records and Private Eyes by good old Daryl Hall and John Oates, it's clear where her priorities are. This thing is fucking pristine. Flat as a pancake, not a scratch on it. The jacket's a little moldy but the LP looks like it's fresh off the shelves of Sam Goody.

And two: There are a lot of things that stand the test of time. This album is not one of those things. Man, wow, not good. I told myself I was gonna listen to every playable record all the way through at least once. But I'm listening to Philadelphia's finest right now and I don't know if I can make the long hard slog to the end. Back when I was a kid I loved Hall and Oates. But man, I don't know if the nostalgia is enough to help me soldier through this one. Woof.

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The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

I just saw my two-year-old spontaneously get up and start dancing to "With a Little Help From My Friends." It was the best thing I ever saw.

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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.

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U2 - The Joshua Tree

U2 followed in the footsteps of the Police by speaking English with a funny accent, being awesome, writing socially conscious lyrics, and following a complete tool around wherever he led. We could solve the world's Bono and Sting problems by locking them together in a room with one small mirror.

Anyway, this is U2 from back before Bono's sanity collapsed under the weight of his own ego and so it's actually pretty good.

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John Waite - No Brakes

Oh Christ, this horseshit again. Look there are plenty of things about the 80s I liked. MTV. Transformers. Weird Al. Puberty... maybe not puberty. But if you like this shit and you wanna take a walk down memory lane go ahead and click on this. But don't say I didn't warn you because it's excruciating.

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Steve Winwood - Winwood & Friends

Pff. As if Winwood had any friends.

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