Saturday, July 04, 2009

my big hpb haul

on wednesday, my sweetie took me on the "hpb tour of the metromess" as a late b-day prezzie. as it worked out, we only made it to ridgmar and hulen, which was plenty. reviewing my selection in light of the convo at this week's stooge prac (ray and teague talking about their first recs when they were kids) reminds me how much my taste is a product of the era when i came up.

eric burdon & the animals - winds of change. from his "lorenzo st. dubois"/hipi period, this is still a pretty good elpee. i smashed my original copy up with rocks in mrs. weisz's backyard when i was 14. this has john weider on it, who was later in family, playing violin on "paint it black," which was the encore when i saw eric (with aynsley dunbar on drums!) play a great show at, um, main street days in grapevine a decade or so ago. he's still got it. the first side's kinda crackly and has a coupla skips, but the second side's pristine.

little walter. from the garish-cartoon-covered all platinum series of chess 2lp reishes. this was in the box of "keepers" that my future ex-wife donated to goodwill in shreveport ca. '89. great stuff, and it doesn't duplicate anything on my fave little walter disc, hate to see you go.

don't let me be misunderstood by eric burdon. back in the late '80s, he pubbed another autobiography, i used to be an animal, but i'm alright now, which was edited by pete townshend while he was doing that for faber & faber. never seen that one, but thisun, from 2001, is an entertaining read in the same way as mitch ryder's it was all right (or the dvd of howard kaylan's my dinner with jimi that i recently reviewed for the i-94 bar -- one of these days, the barman will post it): just an old guy talking story, but if you're enamored of the music of a certain time, his stories are pretty interesting. and he never slowed down, altho his career fortunes kinda ebbed and flowed.

ugly things #21. the ish with part 2 of the misunderstood story and a piece on keith relf's armageddon. the print sure used to be tiny then (2003), even tho they'd been publishing for 20 years by then. mike stax's asperger-like obsessive-compulsive scholarship is exemplary.

the story of them. double cd with everything van morrison recorded with these guys. i owned a lot of this on two cassettes, one of which is still playing in my sweetie's car, but that won't last forever. this might even be the copy i sold to hpb six or seven years ago, when i was still paying child support and subsisting on hot dogs/pbs's/pico de gallo. they might not have had three shit-hot lead gtrists like the yardbirds or a white james brown wannabe like the stones, but these guys were my favorite brit invasion arranbee group after the animals. there was a lot more to them than "gloria," "here comes the night," "mystic eyes," "it's all over now, baby blue," and "i can only give you everything" -- altho that'd be enough for lotsa bands.

miles davis - kind of blue and workin', relaxin', steamin'. after hearing "flamenco sketches" in robert de niro's a bronx tale, i had to pick up another copy of miles '59 masterpiece to replace the one i gave my son-in-law. then i found a cheap-line triple cd that had three of the four albs miles cut with his first classic quintet to break his prestige contract in '56. (as luck would have it, i already had cookin'.) miles, trane, red garland, paul chambers, and philly joe jones just went into the studio and recorded every tune they knew. marvelous stuff.

bill frisell - have a little faith. the avant-jazz gtr guy plays copland, ives, muddy waters, madonna, and john hiatt (the singer, i discovered, of one of the most annoying songs on the central market muzak). with guy klucevsek, don byron, joey barron, and kermit driscoll.

jimi hendrix experience - axis: bold as love. the album i listened to instead of going to classes at the state university of new york at albany, fall '75. probably his best alb as a songwriter, even tho srv and his clones have ruined "little wing" for me forever.

josh alan - blacks 'n' jews. the noo yawk expat gtrist-singer-songwriter-journo's best album, now available digitally, but i got a used cd copy, signed by the man himself.

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