Music Music Music

‘Music was my first love and it will be my last ‘, so sang John Miles and really he could have been singing about me or any other serious muso on this planet. Some people might give you this as a definition :- A muso is a person who is obsessed with music. Their record collection will contain music and artists nobody else has heard of. This would not be entirely accurate but it bears more than a great deal of the real truth in my case and I have been obsessed by music since about the age of 10 or 11 years old. I remember listening to my family’s Top Of The Pops compilations, records by Alf Garnett aka Warren Mitchell singing first and second world war songs and music hall classics, listening to the charts on Sunday evenings replayed on a reel to reel tape recorder mostly compared by Jimmy Savile (oh dear !!!) and also hearing my dear old Granddad singing off-key ditties and his unique versions from the music hall in his armchair while he rolled his own cigarettes and we all watched Hawaii 5-O on the television. I remember buying my first single from Woolworths, it was Mungo Jerry’s ‘Baby Jump’ and my first proper LP was T.Rex’s ‘Bolan Boogie’. I can recall the thrill of buying Dr Feelgood’s ‘Down By The Jetty’ and realising it was recorded in mono not stereo. I even lusted over the sexy female model covers of the early Roxy Music albums, I can remember watching Johnny Winter somewhere on whatever channel it was on at the time and then rushing out to buy his first drugs free comeback effort ‘Still Alive & Well’ and then playing it non- stop for weeks on end, I can recall dancing on my bed to Mud’s ‘Tiger Feet’ and having my first real kiss to Mott’s ‘All The Young Dudes’.    I remember being fascinated by a fold-out Vertigo records LP from Juicy Lucy and wondering why did Status Quo have their previous album covers embossed on the back of each new album release. Why did I have an album by Tony Williams Lifetime and one by the Carry On Team singing novelty songs and why was Ernie the Fastest Milkman In The West by Benny Hill not regarded as one of the truly great modern English Folk Songs  ? So as I have said before I have been obsessed for years and at various periods collected over 2000 LP’s, 500 cassettes, 1000 CD’s, various minidiscs, occasional eight tracks and boxes of 45’s. Now after years of buying, selling and culling I have about 1000 LP’s left, no cassettes anymore, about 100 CD’s and around 60,000 mp3’s – yes I went digital a few years back for storage purposes mainly and yes because I do love ‘ the shuffle’ on all my media devices. So I really cannot capture in four tracks my career as a musicologist (sounds like I was somehow aiming to be the new Alan Lomax) but seriously folks below is some music that I have always regarded very highly and will go back to even while I’m trying to capture, listen to and file whatever else hits my musical radar on a daily basis.

Johnnie Allan - Promised Land

Question Mark & The Mysterians - 96 Tears

The Fabulous Thunderbirds - Marked Deck

Palace Bros - Ohio River Boat Song

Caravans, Council Estates and Class

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I spent last weekend in a caravan at a holiday centre in the North East of England. This was my second of such adventures this year as I had been previously enticed by an offer of some collectable vouchers in a daily newspaper offering luxury caravan breaks at bargain prices. I hadn’t enjoyed the first one in July very much so I was not particularly looking forward to this one either but the difference being this break was over a weekend not a week this time around. Due to a change in circumstances we arrived on the Saturday morning rather than the designated check-in on Friday evening. Saturday night proved to be quite an experience for me and is not something I shall ever want repeated, for me it was as if I had moved to a sink estate overnight. I am not a snob and see myself as somewhat lower Middle Class in the so-called class pecking order that still pervades this country where I live. I have always worked, my parents have always worked and my grandparents all worked their whole lives and we have never been poor, never missed paying bills or mortgages and I have been brought up to be respectable, have good manners and be considerate of others. These attributes were certainly absent from a minority of my fellow caravan park dwellers on Saturday night and caused me to exhibit feelings of anger, extreme annoyance and exasperation as time moved into the early hours of Sunday morning. I have sworn never to darken the doors of one of these holiday destinations again as in my normal life I spend quite a bit of time avoiding people often labelled as a ‘chav’.

I know a lot of the media intelligentsia think that ‘chav’ is a demeaning word for the Working Class but to me it does not so much sum up a class more a certain type of individual behaviour that has become more prevalent year after year since the fall of Thatcher and then the rise and fall of Blair & Brown. I personally think these people are clueless, stupid and don’t deserve to be included in any class system breakdown whatsoever. They are thick, feral and a fucking blight that festers in the concrete council estate undergrowth that has been allowed to grow like mould in a petri dish with successive governments ignoring the issues and focusing more on looking upwards in the class chain towards the major capitalist corporations and financial bully boys rather than actually trying to bring some decency and a change of philosophy for people at the other extreme end of society instead of leaving them to rely on benefits and charitable benevolence with no decent future prospects in sight other than a weekend trip to a caravan park every now and again……………

Enjoy

 

 

Steve & The Holidays - Unemployment

Albertina Walker & The Caravans - Put A Little Love In Your Heart

Blitzen Trapper - Country Caravan

William Bell - Every Day Will Be Like A Holiday

catl - Working Man Soul

I Heard That Pardon

Noise is everywhere today, you just cannot escape it. Personally I hate noise especially any that is created by selfish inconsiderate people and believe me there are quite a few. I have never lived too far from noise and when I go anywhere that you cannot hear anything but silence, nature’s silence then it becomes blissful, something mystical.

Sadly I’m never in those places very often so I have to put up with cars with booming bass stereos, massive exhausts, screeching tyres, loud revving engines, neighbours who think having a full drum kit and playing it with the windows open in a suburban house is cool. People you cannot talk unless they are virtually shouting so that everyone in their vicinity can hear every useless, pointless word they have to say. People who walk along the road talking into tiny earphones, so they can have a conversation with someone else somewhere on their important and magical ‘iphone or android thingy’.

Many play their crappy moronic chart music to the whole street as they walk past rather than actually wear some fucking earphones and of course there are those that somehow cannot seem to work out that their mp3 player is so loud that everyone on the train or bus can hear this totally annoying buzzing, scratching sound for what often seems like forever. Probably by now you can see where I’m coming from and I haven’t even mentioned the constant irritation of living under a major airport flight path of which I have had to do so many times in the past.

Anyway when it comes to music, noise and feedback isn’t very high on my list of listening habits but I do try but it has to happen in very small doses.

So today I now give you three examples of the sort of levels of noise that I can listen to and feel reasonably comfortable with.

Enjoy

 

Japandroids - The House That Heaven Built

Bob Mould - Keep Believing

Great White Buffalo - Jaybells

Mix No 3 Sept 2012

Apologies but I have been lacking once again in my duties as The Man Who Rode The Mule recently so below is my new monthly choice of sounds for any interweb viewers who care about this blog

 

The Man Who Rode The Mule Hopes That You Like It......

 

1. Galactic - Voyage Ton Flag

2. John Paul Keith - Bad Luck Baby

3. Herbie Duncan w/Red Wells & His Caravan - Little Angel

4. Joey Allcorn - Huntsville

5. The Heavy - Big Bad Wolf

6. Loudon Wainwright III - Somebody Else

7. Roxy Music - Out Of The Blue

8. The Dirty Guv'nahs - Quiet Tigers

9. Eddie Lang - Something Within Me

10. Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band - Too Much Time

11. Camper Van Beethoven - Take The Skinheads Bowling

12. American Aquarium - Coffee And Cigarettes

13. Townes Van Zandt - Racing In The Street 

14. Whispering Pines - Purest Dreams

15. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Babe, You Turn Me On

16. Varnaline - Saviours

17. Ponderosa - Never Come Back

The Man Who Mix No 3 - Sept 2012

Mix No 2 August 2012

The Man Who Rode The Mule Hopes That You Like It......

• 1.   I, Ludicrous - Preposterous Tales
• 2.   Gladys Knight & The Pips - Didn't You Know (You'd Have To Cry Sometime)
• 3.   Jim Boss & The Sundowners - Your Love Is Stronger Than Dirt
• 4.   Robert Smith-Hald - Thou Mayest 
• 5.   Bob Dylan - Dixie
• 6.   4h Royalty - Fall Of The Face Of The Earth With Me
• 7.   Muddy Waters - Unk In Funk
• 8.   JKutchma - Used To Believe
• 9.   Mondo Davis - Dear London
• 10.  The Dimestore Junkies - The Machine
• 11.  Hacienda - Don't You Ever
• 12.  Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner - Jeannie's Afraid Of The Dark
• 13.  Floyd Dakin Combo - Look What You Gone And Done
• 14.  Hurray For The Riff Raff - Ode to John And Yoko
• 15.  Lisa Cormier & The Sundown Playboys - Saturday Night Special
• 16.  Roger Alan Wade - Cars And Guns
• 17.  T.Rex - Woodland Rock

The Man Who Mix No 2 - August 2012

And as the poor worked for a life at every waking hour

Last week I had just departed the train station in a large student enclave outside a major Northern city when I saw stencilled on a wall the following  logo ‘Slave To The Wage’, this made me chuckle slightly as it hit home to me immediately that this message completely put a name to my current feelings at work. I have been a Wage Slave now for about 35 years without a major break. Not for me a life changing gap year, no staying at home in my late teens with my parents paying all the bills, no long term sick, absolutely nothing, ‘nada’, other than the six months in 1985 that I spent travelling  the USA with my best mate Paul H.

I guess almost certainly by reading these comments you can probably tell that I’ve had enough and dear readers that would be a spot on assessment of my current work life predicament. I Want Out……no more days spent listening to bullshit, staring at spreadsheets, glancing at the clock on my PC then pretending I actually care about my job, my employer, my future prospects. I’ve done my bit for Queen & Country, I’ve paid my tax, I’ve contributed to National Insurance, I’ve maintained my pension and contributed to a Union for all those years and continue to do so BUT now I want a rest and a chance to live my life the way I want and not be a Wage Slave anymore.

So I have chosen four tracks that represent a wide ranging summation of my feelings on the matter of work. We have Australian anti-capitalist/consumerism electro band Snog, next are the legendary Gourds from Austin Texas, long term purveyors of mad Alternative Country with a twist, followed by the jazz/soul ensemble The Young Holt Trio from Chicago performing live and finally from further along the States in Ohio you can find ex-Soledad Brothers member Johnny Walker’s kicking up a storm of noise with his superb new band The Cut In The Hill Gang. 

Enjoy

Snog - Corporate Slave

The Gourds - When The Money Comes Rolling In

Young Holt Trio - Aint There Something Money Cant Buy (Live Medley)

Cut in the Hill Gang - Fuck The People/Revolution

Better Call Saul

I try not to watch too much TV, and most of my favourite programmes over the last few years have hardly managed to break into the mainstream TV schedules anyway. Of course BBC4 is on freeview and there you can view great Nordic Noir and I have especially enjoyed The Bridge, The Killing and Borgen recently, all of which were high class series written for people who actually like to think about what they are watching.

Thinking about this in more detail I realised that over the years I have always gravitated towards shows from the US most of all. I remember Barney Miller, The Rockford Files and Hill Street Blues. Who could forget Jack Lord on Hawaii Five-O every Friday night in the 1970’s. Recently though things have changed and American TV series have a harder more contemporary edge.

Series such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, Game Of Thrones and others such as Justified, The Walking Dead, Oz, Falling Skies to name some more. Although I will admit that none of these have moved me and caused such anticipation in me every time a new series was produced until AMC’s Breaking Bad appeared in 2008. Now this is a show that deserves a wider audience, it is often only found on the more obscure satellite channels and then put on with no fanfare or advanced warning which is a TV crime because  this series has just everything. Great acting, great storylines, great music and it also has the unique ability to pull you into this fictional story and you really live these characters. I won’t bore you with a long synopsis (try Wikipedia Folks !) other than to mention that it’s the story of two men Walter White played by the majestic Bryan Cranston and Jesse Pinkman played by actor Aaron Paul and their life and death struggle to produce and sell Crystal Meth on the streets of Albuquerque, New Mexico, but it is so much more than that so please go and purchase the DVD’s, you would not be disappointed. I know the final and fifth series has just begun in the States and I am ready and waiting to see these guy’s through to a conclusion. As I have said earlier the show has tremendous background music supplied and sourced by David Porter and I was lucky enough to find a ‘homemade’ compilation on the net with all the music from the first three series, so below are a few personal choices.

Enjoy

Buddy Stuart - Sun Shine On Me

Darondo - Didn't I

Son Of Dave - Shake A Bone

Teddy Bears {Feat Eve} - Rocket Scientist