Cheevyjames’ Musical Roundhouse

Don and I exchanged a bunch of music many months ago with the idea of introducing each other to “new music”. As I do with all music I get from people, I’m offering up a review of it all. I made Don an MP3 disc which he’s in the process of reviewing (go here), so what I’ll do is post the stuff he gave me (which was significantly more) in 2 sections.

What I’m posting is the raw data, my thoughts on hearing the stuff. It’s VERY uncensored and it’s mostly concerned with what I’m deleting. See, I put all of this stuff on my iPod and the stuff I like will stay on there; what I don’t like will be deleted. It’s usually easier to just put the stuff I get rid of.

Of course, this is long as hell (thus the split):

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Ah, first song of I’s just started: George Harrison’s I’d Have You Anytime. I absolutely LOVE this song; it’s so gorgeous. The perfect start to Harrison’s All Things Must Pass album, which is wonderful. Right now I’m sad that I’m doing this A-Z thing and I can’t hear the album in its entirety. But I must soldier on.

And thus, we come to Dah-veed’s I’d Rather Be Lost. Ahhhh, nice.

I don’t think I mentioned yet, but the house is DONE! Painting ended this weekend and everything looks as it should. Yay! There are still small pockets of disorganization, but we’ll attend to those one at a time and get them done soonly. Friday will be our first “dinner” and the winners are Jenn and Eric. I’m really excited for that.

Jenn and I had our first practice in the finished music room on Monday and it went really well. The room has a good feel to it. I think the yellow works. Oh, and I did write some lyrics this weekend…a political song called In Our Own Minds. I sent it to her last night so now it’s there for her to work her magic on. The practice itself was a bit sloppy, but we laughed it off. I’m happy with the songs though. We talked a lot about various band stuff and some of the possibilities really excite me.

I find it odd that iTunes organizes the “I_apostrophes” alphabetically before the “I_spaces”…so that the first song is I’d Have You Anytime, instead of I Advance Masked. That’s strange.

Oh well!

Current Location: on my butt

Current Mood: good

Current Music: I’ll Be Back - The Beatles

Last night I watched the final Shades of Winter performance. If you don’t know, here’s the brief explanation: the singer of Shades is Jennifer, my sister and also the singer in my band. Shades’ guitarist, Don, hosts the Heavy Metal Lunch with me. So, yeah, the people in this band are my close friends.

It was difficult to watch the show last night because I knew it would be the last. At their practice this week, Don told the band that he was leaving the group and even though they have another gig scheduled next month, I never believed that they’d play it. In Don leaving the group it folded, due to him being the primary songwriter and driving force behind the band. Oh, and they practiced at his place. I don’t know how much discussion, if any, there was to continuing without Don, but I assume that it just didn’t make sense to Jenn, Susie and Elana. The band’s been in a strange place for the past few months anyway, so none of this came as a surprise.

For me, being both a fan of the group and friends with the nucleus of the group (Don and Jenn) I guess I’ve experienced more of the “band drama” than the casual person who might show up for their gigs. I have to say that it’s been difficult for me to be in the middle of them as they’ve moved apart. Their partnership only lasted 2 years, but I really believe it was one of those special musical partnerships. No, they weren’t Lennon and McCartney (but, really, who else is even close?) but I think some great songs came out of the two of them. As each song started last night, all I could think of was, “Dammit, this is the last time I’m going to hear this song…and this is such a good song!”. It was emotional for me, and being the musical sap that I am, came close to crying a few times. I sound like such a baby saying that! I know I wasn’t the only one who thought it was the “last time” for a lot of those songs either.

I thought they played really well, as well as should be expected at a final gig. Most of the show was very solemn, even while the songs still sounded great. I was SO proud of them that they chose to open and close the show with new songs. They both sounded good too, and it’s a shame they won’t be performed by this band anymore. Everyone played with a mindset of “we’re going to play these songs as best we can” and I think they did. Everyone, Susie, Jenn, Don & Elana, played and sang their butts off. You know, if they had really sucked you could say, oh it’s not a big loss to the world. But they were GOOD! Really good. They showed how great of a band they are and just proved even more how much I’ll miss their music.

As I told Jenn the other day, any time a good band breaks up, *everyone* loses. Certainly true in this case.

Thanks for the great music, guys.

Current Location: home - kitchen table

Current Mood: sad

Current Music: hammering and other sounds from our new front door being put on

I really didn’t think it would work. I took the stuff out of the box expecting nothing to happen.

BUT IT DID!

I actually played *ATARI*. You know, the old-school Atari. 2600. Pac-Man. Frogger. COMBAT!!

It’s funny, I still suck supremely at Pac-Man. Somehow back in the day my brother and his friend Paul figured out a way (after playing continuously for HOURS) to get the ghosts to run away from you. Yes, *away*. I remember just being mesmerized when it happend. I sure could never get that far, pass that many levels. So yeah, like I said, I am still horrible at Pac-Man. I always was.

But dood - I just played Pac-Man on the Atari 2600. I’m in shock.

It wasn’t a perfect gaming environment, though. The picture was extremely fuzzy, it was B/W instead of color (though if you keep your hand on the switch in the back it goes to fuzzy color for a second or two), and there was little sound besides static.

I tried to play a few other games, but since it had so much static it was hard to tell what was going on. I did play Frogger, but I couldn’t see the logs in the water very well. Pitfall 2 was hard since I couldn’t see the ladders. Man, the original Pitfall was my favorite game back in the day. I loved that one. I tried a few others, but Combat was the one I really hoped would work. I couldn’t figure out how to get it going once I turned it on. It was nice to look at though! Oh yeah, I played Q-Bert too.

I’m gonna see if I can get it to look better tomorrow, but at least I did play it again. I swear, I haven’t played the thing in over 20 years. I think I was in 4th grade or so. Wow.

OK, I’m tired, but I just had to report. INSANE!

Current Mood: nostalgic

Current Music: Pink Floyd - Fearless

Well, I’m into the D’s on my listening. Jimmy Buffett’s “Dallas” is fading out as I type…and that goes into Alice in Chains Damn That River. Hell yeah!

The C’s were an interesting group. Naturally, a lot of Christmas music was in there (since most of those songs start with the word “Christmas”) and that naturally got skipped. Who wants to listen to Xmas music in August? Hell, or December? Also in the C’s were all the “Concertos” by various classical composers. LOTS there. So that was interesting to sit through, though a bit tedious. Tori Amos has a lot of songs that start with C, and as I haven’t cleaned out all that I have, there was a lot. By “cleaned out” I mean, when I borrow the TA CD’s from Jenn, I just load them onto the iPod and then later I go through and take out the ones I don’t want. I’ve only cleaned up the ones from Little Earthquakes and Strange Little Girls. Yes, there will be some deleting. I knew this before, but in the course of painting whenever a Tori song would come up…Julie would just WRETCH. She despises her. I do understand why a lot of people don’t like her. I don’t really like her voice too much, and I could care less about her lyrics, but I do think she writes some good songs (musically) as well as having good arrangements and melodies. She’s definitely *interesting*, that’s for sure. And I do enjoy seeing the progression of her music over the years. I have one more CD of her’s (Beekeeper) to get from Jenn, until she buys the new one, and after that I’ll definitely be ready to move on to other music.

There are a lot of “D” songs, but it’s a good list so I should enjoy it. It’s been good so far. The group that I’m most excited to get to is the “I” group. That’s where a lot of the King Crimson improvs are. Most of those tracks are labeled as “Improv - blah blah blah” so I’m getting 33 KC improvs in a row! That will be fun listening.

The music room is halfway painted and the computer/table are set up on one wall with the couch on the other. Yay half! I should be able to put the piano in its place this evening. We’re hoping to be done with the room tomorrow and start putting this up on Sunday. Sweet. And then, it’s on to painting the kitchen. Oh boy!

Band news - we didn’t get into the Carrboro Music Fest. That bites. So, Jenn and I have some things to discuss on Monday at practice. SXSW is accepting applications now for 2008 so we need to figure out what we’re going to do. I’d love to get in this year. Any excuse to go to Austin, I tell ya.

Current Location: near a computer

Current Mood: normal

Current Music: Frank Zappa - Damp Ankles

This weekend was spent in a flurry of priming & painting my music room, and well as cleaning up an absolutely horrible mess in our sun room. First the good part! My music room has a nice coat of yellow on it and I believe that part is done. All that’s lacking is painting the shelves and trim. I was skeptical about having my music room be yellow. Julie really wanted it, and her mom agreed, but I was unsure. I really wanted a blue room (you know, my favorite color and all), but I was voted down. Evidently, with the red couch in there it would be too “patriotic” in there with blue walls. Feh! So, when the idea of a “yellow” was floated again, I thought about it, pondered what it might mean, and came to accept the idea. I figured that there’s a very good possibility that the color could inspire me. That’s based on the last time we had yellow on our walls - back in our house in Leander. We had the living room and entry in a yellow, and that directly inspired my song “The Big Yellow Bastard”. I really like that tune and since something that good came out of a yellow wall, I figured…why not. I like it so far, but it’s still very hard to get a feel for the room when there’s still a significant part that is only primer’d and the furniture is all crammed in the middle of the floor. But still, progress. I worked on priming the bookshelves yesterday, and that’s why my hands were still quite white this morning. It makes me happy to no longer see the brown 70’s-paneled walls in my room. I had enough of that stuff growing up.

The fun on Saturday evening - Julie refuses to let me blame myself, but it really is my fault. The washer’s “exit” tube came out of the pipe while a load was running and proceeded to flood our sun room. Most of my boxes that were not yet in my music room were in that room. My first thought was about my music books (hell, and all of my non-fiction) as well as my tapes, yearbooks, posters, etc etc. We didn’t notice this flooded room until it was definitely too late. It was about an inch of standing water, with more coming in all of the time. After going bonkers getting everything out of the room and getting the water outside…it was obvious how bad the damage was. Thankfully, only half of the boxes got wet, and only only those things that were on the bottom of those boxes. So yes, while a lot of our yearbooks were waterdamaged as well as my Mike Keneally & Beatles posters…that was the easy part to deal with. The floor, our beautiful wood paneling, is just absolutely ruined. It just pains me to even think about it. I mean, I’m glad that it was confined to only 1 room, but still. We’ve been in this house just a month and something’s already been ruined. ARGH! So we’re talking to the insurance company to see what our options are about replacing the floor in there. The floor had to have been sitting in water for about 30 minutes or so before we noticed (it’s on a lower level than the rest of the house). So, how is it my fault? I blame myself since I was the one who set up the washer when we moved in and clearly I could have secured the exit hose better. So yeah, I feel great about that!

So, anyway!

I’m still attempting my “song-a-thon” on the iPod and I’m currently up to Led Zep’s Bonzo’s Montreaux. This bores me, but I think I’ll just let it play. We had the ‘Pod going while doing all the painting this weekend and it bore some interesting results. Julie had to sit through a lot of things that normally she wouldn’t listen to (all of my crazy Iron Maiden, for instance), but I also had to sit through her Spanish pop music. I really wish I just had the time to sit down and comment on every single song that comes up. But, thankfully for you I don’t. The B’s shouldn’t last too much longer (only 130 or so left) and I’m sure I’ll hit the C’s later this week. I dread the S’s, because there’s a LOT of songs that start with S. Oh well, I may not even be able to last that long. Regardless, it’s an interesting process. I’m listening to a lot of songs I wouldn’t normally hear, like this Crimson tune from their 1994 rehearsals. I haven’t listened to that CD enough, even though it’s only “decent”.

Awright, the bus calls and then it’s more painting and listening to the A-Z. Whee!

Current Location: about to be the bus

Current Mood: okay

Current Music: King Crimson - Booga Looga > Zappa - The Booger Man