The Music: 100 Proof, Aged i Soul; Somebody’s been sleeping in my bed. [1]
The album is great late 60’s soul. Put together by Motown greats Holland- Dozier- Holland, and signed to the “Hot Wax” label… (One of two such labels set up by the team, the other being Invictus), the group boasted of three of the best vocalists HDH ever signed; Steve Mancha, Eddie Holiday, and Joe Stubbs… the latter being the brother of Levi, who led the Four Tops.
Certainly, the sound is similar in many ways to the Four Tops, but the production sensibilities, are quite a bit different. For one thing the vocals use a generous amount of tape and microphone overload, and so sound reminiscent of Felix Cavalieres vocals with the Rascals, or perhaps a number of Michael McDonald’s performances. Almost “Blue-Eye soul”. Almost. Tape overload, in case you don’t know, was a trick for getting a louder overall sound to AM broadcasts, that’s been used ever since Alan Freed started doing it back in the 50’s. On other comparison would be, that these guys would feel right at home with Southside Johnny’s early Epic recordings… the overall sound is quite different from Southside, (And certainly, Miami Steve never fell into the trap of middle 60’s sound tricks) but the FEEL is much the same.
(Hmmm. Ya know, come to think of it, I can hear, in my mind’s ear, Southside doing “I’ve come to save you” from the first album… He didn’t of course… but I mean to say, he could have cut that one easily.It would have fit right in on “This Time it’s for Real” It would have even put up with Don Mehan’s over-echoed mixing… Oh, well)
One is reminded of the Tower of Power album that was just out a year to back, Bump City. In many ways, the song craft is the same; nice little tunes, for a vocalist that can carry them, a number of decent hooks, for the taste mongers of the day, and a numbOne er of good spots to blow little musical flash into. Like that TOP album, the lyrics are often downright silly, but the sound is so outtasight, you don’t really care.
In the whole, this is a group that deserved far better than they got in the changeable times of the late 60’s and early70’s. And they still can’t seem to catch a break; since HDH sold the rights to the record company, several people have owned the rights to the sounds… Fantasy records (Yes, that Fantasy) was one of them. Not good. On the bright side, I’m hearing that Joe Tarantino remastered both their albums for Concord Music, who owns the rights, last I knew. I’ve not heard of this remaster being released, though.
Like I say; Sad.
* Interesting thought from Mark Steyn [2], today:
In Gaza, Islamic Jihad is planning to send waves of female suicide bombers into action against the Zionist Entity. Asked by an Israeli reporter whether self-detonating ladies enjoy the same 72-virgin deal as the lads, an Arab scholar said no, but that the gals will be served in Paradise by “dwarfs.” Snow White got seven dwarfs, but it’s unclear whether Blow White will get the full 72: Sleepy, Grumpy, Bashful, etc., all the way down to Incendiary, Non-Alcoholic and Anti-Zionist.
Ya know, I’d wondered about that one, myself. One wonders what kind of propaganda they managed to inflict on these women to get them to sacrifice themselves so. Certainly, some kind of reward is offered. But what? And by the way, as Steyn indicates, it doesn’t need to make sense…
* Word on the street [3] that Whacky Charlie’s having second thoughts about that 9/11 conspiracy flick of his. No shock for that; the negatives he’s getting off this have to be in the lead weight category. But that’s not the only indication overall:
The conspiracy documentary got a further boost earlier this month when Virgin Atlantic announced it would offer the current, narration-free version as an in-flight movie choice. But just days later, it scrapped the idea. “After Virgin announced it, bloggers went nuts and there was so much negative feedback that [the airline] a few days later nixed it,” the source said.
(Chuckle) Leaving aside the rather obvious attempt to indoctrinate a captive audience, I am reminded instantly of the old Airplane movies… I don’t recall which one… where airline passenger Helen Hayes slips on her headphones to enjoy the in flight movie… which turns out to be films of airliner test crashes. This is classic, people. I’ll bet there are some over there at Virgin Atlanic who don’t understand why they got their butts kicked on this stuff.
.
* Yes, I noted that Loud Rosie quit “The View” [4]
I note that Kathy Griffin says [5] the reason she left was the split screen. Yeah, I don’t think so either, but….
Revealing a conversation she had with O’Donnell about how the show’s producers split O’Donnell’s image with Hasselbeck’s during their fight, Griffin said: “And that’s what it was. I said, ‘What was really it?’ And she said, ‘The split-screen.’ She said, ‘I don’t want to do Hannity and Colmes. ‘ “
That may fly in the world of he said, she said, but out here in the real world, David’s got this one right, I think; She couldn’t deal with being challenged. So it happens every time, and both David and I have seen it this way for many years, now between us. Full disclosure: Personally, I I’m convinced the world would be well served by her and her girlfriend taking a nice romantic walk off the pier.
.
* Dalrymple [6] makes an interesting note, today:
There is something to be said here about the word “depression,” which has almost entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one’s state of mind, or one’s mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one’s life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.
A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is willfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place.
He does get into this somewhat deeper, but this short passage brings up a point that I have often considered central in the argument against government based Healthcare; such funding schemes can only encourage this kind of behavior. Government funding is a hypochondriac’s heaven. Thereby, raising prices taxes for us all.
* My new ride came with an XM Radio receiver built in, and I’ve been checking it out.
I must say, I’m disappointed by what I’m hearing… the audio quality stinks. I mean 64 to 96kbit bad. as a reminder, I have somewhere on the order of 40 gig of MP3’s on file on the internal and network of Casa De Bit. Generally, I can’t listen to digitally encoded audio with a bitstream of anything less than 128k. Even there, things start getting edgy. The streams I’m getting off XM are seriously below that, at least judging by the audio. What they’re putting on the channels I can get… (They seem to be doing some kind of promotion, this weekend, and so have a few channels open, apparently to even non-subscribers) is actually quite good… in terms of content. A notch in their favor. But what I’m hearing in terms of technical sound is decidedly not high quality.
The distortion can be visually described this way:
Yes, that’s a fairly lossy JPG, blown up so you can see the imperfections. It is, in fact the same file has posted in the paragraph above. The concept is the same, on a visual track. Lesson digital compression, means less distortion, in both the visual and the audio realm. It also means additional bandwidth being consumed , and that to XM means less channels are available at the Satalite to put programing on.
In fairness, most people can’t hear, much less identify what I’m hearing. Mostly what I’m hearing, is arriving at my ear as phase instability and intermod distortion, both caused by the data compression being applied.
In further fairness, it should be pointed out that many of the terrestrial stations that I listen to our also run into faced ability issues , either from their origin material which is all computer driven anymore anyway, or issues with their audio processing at the transmitter’s audio chain, or both. There is, after all, no automatic gain control on the planet that is completely phase stable. Even the digital ones will get nasty if you push ’em too hard.
So the question becomes, is an XM subscription worth it to me? If the answer is “possibly”. I’m still toying with the idea. If the truck hadn’t come with the unit, I’d not even be considering it at all. As it is, it bothers my hindbrain a little, not making use of all the truck came with.
* Along the same lines, the truck also came with OnStar. At least, it came with the phone. Trouble is, and the phone that they were putting in back in 2004, was a purely analog phone. my system, to be tightened of arises network, new leads to be upgraded. This will end up costing me somewhere on the order of $100.00. Not outlandish fee, given what’s being swapped out, but it’s still a minor annoyance, particularly since I’m not overly flush, just now. I’ve been carrying a cell phone with me for years, of course. The advantage to having one of the truck, is mobile mounted cell phones are higher power, and the longer range. Given the amount of time that we spend out in the boonies camping, it will probably come in handy. So, once the financial situation is where, I’ll probably make that swap. The total will come to $100.00 for the hardware swap, plus another hundred dollars or so for a year’s worth of one star service, plus the cost of the additional line from Verizon, who I am already on. I suppose after all of that, the $15.00 or so to get my XM satellite radio working will seem incidental.
* The old radio hand in me cannot resist mentioning that 77WABC, WLS/890 and 1050CHUM will all be doing “rewinds” this weekend… running shows of their heyday, on Memorial day. Some great listening. If you’re not within daytime earshot of those stations, be aware that there are web links for all three of them.
* Finally, I find myself somewhat bemused this evening, by the lack of flags that I see being flown . Those that are being flown, are not being flown at half mast as would be proper . It’s time to get the flag out of mothballs, people.