redchucks52

The Kinks Greatest Hits

Greatest Hits!
Kinks
Reprise, 1966

Not Big Hits (that was the Rolling Stones’ first greatest hits record) or even Greatest Hits, these are Greatest Hits! by the Kinks. This is a silly name. Look at the cover—it says The Kinks Greatest Hits!, but Amazon and Wikipedia parse that as The Kinks [artist’s name] Greatest Hits! [album name]. This is the first LP I owned. I am proud that it is monaural (mono, it’s called). I can’t explain mono to you if you are under 50 years old; just take my word that it saved me $12 in today’s dollars when I bought the record.

This is an odd record in many ways. Much of it is not great. Just 10 songs on it, 25 minutes long including the spaces between the songs, and not all of them were hits. “Something Better Beginning” is a bad Beatles imitation (“I saw you standing there” and “I hold your hand”? Why didn’t they say “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah”?)

There is clapping in “Everybody’s Going To Be Happy” that isn’t on the beat or double time, just rhythmless.

But “You Really Got Me,” “All Day and All of the Night,” and “Till the End of the Day” are classics. When the band struggled playing those tunes live, it led to speculation about who really was playing on the record.

“Dedicated Follower of Fashion” mocks consumer culture before there was consumer culture: “got to buy the best,” “all the latest fads and trends,” “pleasure-seeking individual,” and “flits from shop to shop just like a butterfly.” And “Well Respected Man” sends up the Thatcher era 20 years ahead of time, as in “doing the best things so conservatively” while a very proper-appearing family mom is soliciting young men, dad boffs the maid, and the kid has his eyes on the family fortune.

If Ray Davies pronounced the words more clearly, this wouldn’t have gotten to vinyl–“frilly nylon panties” (worn by a male; this from a band named the Kinks) and “father [unintelligible] the maid.”

Much mix tape material here. Train to work and back home (as in Taking Care of Business and Morning Train among others), Regent Street and Leicester Square (I could do a tape with references to London streets and neighborhoods: Jethro Tull has a song with Leicester Square in the title, “Play with Fire” has St. John’s Wood, Stepney, Knightsbridge).

There are many words you won’t hear in other songs: pater (as in Latin for father), conservatively, suave, foreign trade, matrimonial, councilors, punctuality, Carnabetian (as in of or pertaining to Carnaby Street).

Mary Worth and Mickey Hart

I never saw this coming. Mary Worth is the lead character in the long-running comic strip of that name. Mostly what goes on is she tells her friends how to live their lives. [MAD Magazine parodied the TV show Route 66 by comparing it to Mary Worth–people who never go to work so they can meddle full-time.] On Sundays the strip includes a boxed quotation about life. Mickey Hart, of course, is a drummer who was in the Grateful Dead for about 30 years. Nobody in the cartoon has EVER listened to the Grateful Dead. I think that’s funny.

The quotation in the funnies was “There’s nothing like music to relieve the soul and uplift it.” Harmless, I guess. I looked up last week’s. It was “Patience attracts happiness: It brings near that which is far.” I’ll keep an eye out for something memorable.

Hart’s article in Wiki makes me think “I Just Want to Bang on the Drum All Day” is his biography. Hart says that since he was 10 all he wanted to do was be a drummer. That reminds me I should post about my Grateful Dead records.

Use it up, wear it out

It was my father’s favorite reply when my siblings and I would say we wanted something: Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. Then he would say he heard that from his parents when he had asked for something.

His parents were farmers near Champaign, Illinois, in the 1920s and ’30s when he was growing up. They did without more than I could imagine, really, when he would tell the story again–running water, electricity, and central heat, for starters. His father went broke along the way–one winter they burned corn in the heating stove because they couldn’t sell the corn for enough to buy coal.

When we kids left the house and didn’t ask for much, the saying I heard the most was ‘Twas ever thus and twill be ever so.’ I think he liked to say ’twill be.’ He stopped following his own advice to not buy much. He and Mom got comfortable and enjoyed having stuff.

Dad lived in a two-bedroom apartment in an old-folks apartment building when he died. When we cleaned it out, we found lots of stuff, some of it unopened. I guess he felt good knowing he could afford a gross of ballpoint pens even if he didn’t write much. And he saved the pen he got from the Olympic Committee, for example, and the next year the neat little calculator. He loved office supplies and electronic toys.

He had probably a hundred 50-sheet legal pads–he’d buy more every time they went on sale. I don’t think he ever pictured himself using that up. I decided I would start using up all my stuff in his honor–and as much of his stuff as it made any sense to even try.

I got serious around 2015. I had about 80 T-shirts saying I was an AYSO coach, fan of the Cleveland baseball team, and Hummel figurine enthusiast (I got that one from my mom). They dated from the early 1990s. I have about 40 now. I have some stories and some photos of this project, and I’ll keep you posted.

Danny Kalb died

He was a fine guitar player, both acoustic and electric. Most notably he was in the Blues Project in the mid-Sixties (but there were reunions and comeback over the decades). They played a mix of Chuck Berry stuff, folk songs, and a lot of blues. The band was talented; the singing was never great. Al Kooper was in it when he was a big star (playing on Dylan’s early electric stuff), Steve Katz, Andy Kulberg, and Roy Blumenfeld.

The band had members come and go; it broke up after three years. The last members put out an album as the Blues Project, then another one as Seatrain (or Sea Train) with material recorded at the same time.

Kalb picked fast and clean on electric guitar. I have a record he did with Stefan Grossman, as well as backup on records by Judy Collins and Phil Ochs. He was on an Elektra sampler. More when I get to his records.

What is this?

Old age is by nature more loquacious

Welcome to my little website. Material will come in four categories, mostly.

I am playing through the 700 or so LPs in my record collection. I will post some information on them, hoping to find someone who cares. Ultimately I want them to go to a good home. I will talk some about the history of music and the last 50 years. And I want to talk mix tapes. For example, I am saving songs about outmoded technology–phone operators, long-distance information, busy signals. There is so much.

I am trying to use up or wear out the stuff I own. T-shirts, ballpoint pens, coffee mugs: Too much stuff. I’ll rejoice when another AYSO coach shirt bites the dust, sharing that here.

I know many things, and lots of things on the innertubes are wrong. Gone are the days when I’d stay up late to correct people, but sometimes I will be provoked to straighten things out here. The day after Thanksgiving I saw multiple stories about how encouraging it was that folks went out in inflationary times to spend money. I have lived in times of inflation, so I can tell you that only a fool puts off buying something when prices are going up faster than what your savings account pays.

And black lyrics matter. There are many web sites that have the lyrics of popular songs. I believe that voice-to-text software produces the content (plus taking from other sites). The lyrics sung by black performers are frequently wrong. Fish Ain’t Bitin’ by Lamont Dozier has the best description of Richard Nixon’s anti-inflation programs (with Phase Two, I thought I was through/and Phase Four gonna take me out the back door). Yet the line that’s “trying to fight with no defense” gets turned into “trying to find with no defense,” whatever that would be. I will correct what I come across.

Be cheerful on Thanksgiving

One song we play on Thanksgiving at our house. Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3. Love the cowbell. Being cheerful is good.

“Some of Buddy Holly”–I like most of Buddy Holly, and I still think that line is funny.

I am a blockhead myself, I realize–I called him Ian Drury for years.

The following song is a cliché on Thanksgiving, but sometimes you can’t do better than a cliché.

The clips with some action don’t sound as good. The song is as funny as it ever was. Warning: It contains a word for “homosexual man” that is mean-spirited and demeaning, but not considered unacceptable at the time.

Please pardon me for missing Thanksgiving.