In 1986, if you would have asked me if I’d go to another KISS concert, I’d probably say “not likely”. I had seen them 2 or 3 times in the non make-up era and while those shows were still entertaining, they didn’t measure up to the with make-up shows.
If you missed the story, KISS with their non-make-up line up at the time were invited to do MTV’s Unplugged series. During the show, original members Peter Criss and Ace Frehley joined them onstage for a song or 2. One thing leads to another and before you know it, KISS is doing a reunion tour. They are recreating the show from 1977. How cool is that?!
A time capsule back to the days when KISS were dominating the world. It worked again they sold out planet Earth doing the exact same stuff they were doing 20 years prior and people loved it.
I’m fairly certain that this was just a serendipitous moment but there is a small part of me that believes the whole thing was engineered by that crafty Gene Simmons. So in the summer of 1996 we drove down to Indianapolis and saw KISS. It was good all over again.
After seeing Pink Floyd live in Boston, I became somewhat obsessed. As you know, I had been a fan of Pink Floyd music since The Academy Days. Now, I wanted to explore the rest of their albums.
I also saw them live again in Chicago at Soldier Field. WXKE was having a concert bus trip. For $100 you got a ticket and a ride on big bus to and from the show. The $100 seems cheap compared to ticket prices these days. I would highly recommend this option. It was a great evening. Three buses left town in the afternoon and headed for Chicago. About halfway we got off the highway and pulled up to a little liquor store in the middle of nowhere. Three buses of Pink Floyd fans disembarked, formed a line and wiped out that little stores inventory of beer and more. I bet that was a record setting day for that little store. They never saw it coming and probably have this record on the books and still no idea why.
The show was just as amazing. The changed the set list a little. They didn’t play Poles Apart like they did in Boston. That was one of my favorites but it didn’t take away from the rest of the show. Another difference I noticed was that the lasers that were beaming into space around wide open Foxboro, were contained inside the stadium in downtown Chicago. I suppose they couldn’t have them shining into the neighboring buildings or the busy airports of the area.
When the live CD, Pulse came out, I was eager to check it out. I hoped that it would capture the shows I had seen. I must admit that I was a little disappointed. They did the entire Dark Side Of The Moon as a big section of the show instead of the stuff we saw. Still they managed to include a lot of great songs but they skipped some good ones.
Next year marks the 20th anniversary of Ray Lynch’s last studio album. As you recall, I got Deep Breakfast as a wedding gift. I picked up The Sky Of Mind shortly after. No Blue Thing was released soon after that. I had been listening to Ray Lynch for about 5 years when Nothing Above My Shoulders But The Evening hit the stores.
Again with the unusual album names. I’m sure that it has some deeper Zen meaning. I remixed my Ray Lynch car tape and renamed it Nothing Above My Shoulders But The Deep Blue Sky Of Mind.
This album carried on in the tradition of No Blue Thing. It has the same kind of musical textures and composition, very enjoyable but again, not quite as infectious as Deep Breakfast.
The real question is What has happened to Ray? Why 20 years and still not new music? When I bought Nothing Above My Shoulders But The Evening, I thought that I’d be enjoying a new Ray Lynch album every 3 or 4 years. That was about the schedule he was keeping up to that point.
As I sit and listen to this album, every track is familiar. I’ve heard them so many times but yet the familiarity is distant like seeing the same teller at the bank but never interacting. I know the songs but not be name. I think that this is primarily due to the fact that I’ve heard things songs as part of a New Age Shuffle so many times over the past 15 years. The songs randomly appear. I can recognize that they are Ray’s but I don’t know the track names Like I do with his previous 3 albums and even those are starting to slip away.
Remember way back when we talked about mom’s Christmas records? They all seemed to be sponsored by gas stations and featured the greatest Christmas songs as performed by the greatest artists to do so. I felt the need to get these songs for our home.
Do you think it is a coincidence that this post should land here? As I write this, it is the Sunday after Thanksgiving and the kids, home from college put up our Christmas tree last night.
I’m sure I mentioned it but when I was a kid, it seemed that we’d get out mom’s Christmas albums on the day after Halloween and start ramping up that Christmas spirit. As an adult, I’ve pushed that back until after Thanksgiving. Every year I create a auto playlist in my medial library that cycles through all of the Christmas music that I have accumulated. There is a lot of it but none of the albums present capture that old nostalgic Christmas feeling like the 2 Disc Time-Life Christmas.
All of the songs on this 2 disc set are lifted from those great performances of the 1940’s and 1950’s with a few more modern pieces mixed in. I bought mine by phoning in during an infomercial back in the early 1990’s. That concept seems to dated that I can’t help but chuckle in my head.
Memory, music and association is a pretty powerful elixir. As I listen to the delightful music of Christmas in this collection, a lifetime of special Christmas feelings and memories flash in my mind. The Christmas songs like 12 Days of Christmas or Deck The Halls make me think of all those Christmas eves spent with the Burns Clan. The sheer madness of presents and joyful play. The more religious songs like O Little Town Of Bethlehem and Silent Night remind me fondly of Christmas Candlelight service in the quiet snow covered town of Saxton’s River, Vermont. O Holy Night byPerry Como is the most moving and spiritual Christmas song I have ever had the privilege to hear and it has been my favorite as long as I can remember.
Since the original release of this very special collection of Christmas songs, I have seen numerous alternate versions and volumes. I’m sure that they are good but this collection of 45 songs on 2 discs, to me, is the essence of Christmas. I can’t imagine the season without it.
Bing Crosby – White Christmas
Roger Whittaker – 12 Days Of Christmas
Perry Como – O Holy Night
Fred Waring – Twas The Night Before Christmas
Ed Ames – Away In A Manger
Jim Reeves – Silent Night
Perry Como – Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town
Bing Crosby – Do You Hear What I Hear?
Burl Ives – Holly Jolly Christmas
Perry Como – It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas
The 1980’s ended with a series of monumental changes. I changed cars 3 times in a year, I moved out of The Roach Motel and I got married. The 1990’s began with a series of changes the most monumental being having two children!
For most of my life, I’ve always had some like Superman’s Fortress Of Solitude or at least like Mike Brady’s Den. As space that was designated as at least mostly mine where I could retreat from the world. In our house on Cortland, it was the second bedroom until it had to be turned into the nursery followed by the kids’ room. At the time I relocated to the basement. It wasn’t fancy or finished in any way but it didn’t matter.
Another change was THX surround sound happened. Although it wasn’t quite the same as how I bought my first Technics system, there were eerie similarities. The bonus was that my old Technics system got moved into my den to make way for the new Technics surround sound system in the living room.
I picked up a little multi-track mixing board and connection two Compact Disc players, a microphone on a boom and cassette deck to the input and output to another cassette deck. This revolutionized my mix tape abilities. In the oldendays It would take nearly 3 hours to make a 90 minute mix tape. Now, I was able to kick out Maxell 110 in real time. Not only that but with the mixing board, cross fading, overdubbing and more effects were possible. WIRD Weird 108 was back.
Another change was a game I started playing that I called Columbia House Roulette. Let me remind you that at this point in my life, I was not able to absorb much in the way of outside influence. MTV didn’t play music anymore. There still wasn’t any internet, smartphones or Shazam. With two little kids, getting out was rare as well. To satisfy my desire for new music, I turned to the daily mail. I happened to get one of those old Columbia House mailers. Back then the sign up form came with a sheet of stickers. You were supposed to pick the album you wanted and stick the stickers on the form.
I took all the stickers and separated them. I discarded the albums that I already had. I discarded the gangsta rap and country music. The rest of the stickers were shuffles and my 15 albums were selected completely at random. One of my successful results in this experiment was Tragic Kingdom by No Doubt. Wow, what a great album.
I had never heard of No Doubt. Tragic Kingdom was not their first album but they were about to ride it to stardom. It is a strange sensation now, to try to imagine what I was thinking or how I felt when I was listening to Tragic Kingdom back before anybody knew about Spiderwebs, or Don’t Speak. I do know that my early favorites were Just A Girl and Different People. Can you believe it? Tragic Kingdom is 17 years old. I think every track on this album is a winner.
Spiderwebs
Just A Girl – There is a section here that reminds me of Sonic the Hedgehog.
In the early 1990’s the Burns’ got a Sega and Sonic The Hedgehog. I debated about whether or not to mention Sonic. In the end, as you see, I did. I love electronic music and have even before the existence of video games. The soundtrack to Sonic is full of simple repetitive riffs but even so, it is still music and I like it.
Part of it is the sentimental, I’m sure. By the time my kids were old enough to play Sonic, the Burns’ had moved on to something else and we borrowed their idle Sega for a while. The kids and I played Sonic for hours on end. It makes me smile to think about and I cannot help but feel a little sadness at the notion that nearly 20 years seem to have vanished so quickly. The Burns boys, to whom Sonic was so important, are all grown and I wonder if they have any feelings about Sonic these days. The music still make me smile.
Green Hill Zone
Special Stage
Marble Zone – I love Marble Zone. I hat Marble Zone
It’s worked so far but we’re not out yet. Yes my love of Star Trek was one of the factors behind my purchase of the Information Society. The entire thing is laced with little snippets from Star Trek and it was fun to try to place them all. On top of that, I found that I really liked this album. It is largely electronic with good beats, DJ effects and sampling of all kinds of stuff. It really is good.
I’m sure that music critics who preach purity and that kind of stuff may scoff at Information Society but that doesn’t matter to me. Music is a very individualized thing and I refuse to like or dislike something based on what so called experts say. If it moves me, it moves me. I’m going to try to over analyze it, I’m just going to go with it and enjoy whatever it is that I enjoy about it.
This album is one of those where every track makes you want to move with the music. Is that the definition of infectious grooves? The even jazz up and rework an old ABBA song. All along, the specter of technology looms. Are there any actual instruments on this album? I don’t care, I like the artificial snap of a synthesized snare drum and the multilayered wall of keyboards. I’m sure all that stuff makes the live concert a little underwhelming but it sounds good to me.
I found a whole series of Compact Discs that seemed to be based on my mom’s scratchy 45’s. I think there are 24 or 25 CD’s in this collection. I eventually would get around half ot them. It really helped my to collect those great songs from The Scratchy 45 Days. I thought it was really cool. I mean at that time it really had been years since I had heard many of those old songs.
Now I had access to many of my old favorites. I can almost the see the attraction of the download a song format. I could have quickly collected just the ones that I remembered. However, one of the cool things about this collection was inclusion of many great songs that either had escaped my memory or escaped mom’s collection but were still popular on the radio. Songs I probably would never have thought to download.
As you can see, a good portion of my early compact disc purchases were devoted toThe Scratchy 45 Days.It was a cool period to reconect with that great old stuff from the 1970’s. How does one measure the impact of this activity on my onverall Musical Evolution? I find it hard to comprehend and even more difficult to express.
It does add a kind of complication as it muddies the waters a little bit. In the mid 1990’s I was deep into New Age Music, replacing the final few vinyl albums that I had, and playing a game I called Columbia House Roulette. The conflux of all this makes this era kind of a melting pot with no clear identity of its own.
Back in the pre-internet days, the only way I could find out if an artist like Ray Lynch had a new album was to go to Musicland and look in the New Age section to see if anything new was there. One day in 1989, there was a new Ray Lynch album.
There is a certain feeling, an excitement when you get surprised by a new album by one of your favorite artists. The hope, the anticipation, the exploration. No Blue Thing while not quite Beep Breakfast was still closer than The Sky Of Mind. It was largely electronic and carried on in the direction that made Deep Breakfast so cool to me. The name of the album didn’t seem too odd compared to his previous albums. There are some good pieces here and it wasn’t long before I made a mix tape for the car called The Deep Blue Sky which was basically a greatest hits tape that featured all the songs from his albums. You have remember that in 1989, Compact Disc players in cars was still a fairly rare and expensive concept.
I really liked the layered textures of Ray Lynch’s music. Often there is a subtle chord that rises and falls like the basecoat on a canvas. Then off to the edges seemingly unrelated riffs cycle while the main focus weaves in and out tying everything together. How does Ray know when to add more and when too much is too much?
While No Blue Thing is an excellent collection of soothing tunes and should certainly be a part of your music collection, it doesn’t seem to have the melodic hooks that stick with you likeDeep Breakfast.The Zen-like qualities persevere.
In 1994, Pink Floyd released what appears to be their last studio album. I didn’t run out and buy it right away. I had been focused on New Age music for a few years. I wouldn’t say exclusively but pretty close. What prompted me to buy The Division Bell was a trip to Vermont. I had been back there in 1993 and I wanted to bring my lovely bride Mary out there to show her some of the beautiful sites in that wooded paradise.
We had planned to go out near the end of May. May offers a fresh green canopy of new leaves, cool nights and the streams and rivers are still full with the runoff of melting mountain snow. Of course I made arrangements to visit Adam who was living in Boston at that time. As it turned out, he surprised me with a ticket to see Pink Floyd live in Foxboro. It shocks me to think that was nearly 20 years ago.
So I bought The Division Bell as preparation for the show. I listened to it a couple of times to get familiar but I wasn’t really moved by it at the time. It was good but didn’t rise to the level of some of my other Floyd favorites. Then I went to the show.
This was the old Foxboro arena where The Patriots played football before they built Gillette Stadium. We drove down to Boston and spent the day downtown seeing the sites and having a Guinness at Cheers. Adam and I went to the show. It was a cool spring evening with a little drizzle now and again but nothing to complain about. The show was phenomenal. They opened with Astronomy Domini and I followed the lasers beaming out into the night sky as far as I could see. I can’t underscore enough how truly awesome it was to be there.
When we got back home to Indiana, I would burn those little balsam fir plugs that I bought in a Vermont Country Store. I’d watch the smoke curl and billow out of the chimney of the little log cabin. While I savored the aroma, I’d listen to The Division Bell and dream of being back in Vermont. After that show and the second one from Chicago, The Division Bell became one of my favorite Pink Floyd albums. Really, Meddle and The Division Bell are my favorites. Is that because the Dark Side, The Wall, and Wish You Were Here are the ones most often played by the world?
Cluster One
What Do You Want From Me
Poles Apart – One of my favorites here. In Boston, the echoes carried on for an eternity.
Marooned
A Great Day For Freedom
Take it Back
Keep Talking
High Hopes – At the show, when the guys on stilts were on the projection screen Adam turned to me and said, “If I were on acid, that would bother me.”
in the non make-up era and while those shows were still entertaining, they didn’t measure up to the with make-up shows.
