It happened like this......I was back in New Zealand on vacation and someone picked up on the fact that - despite the bona fide accent - I wasn't local.
I was tempted by this one today, but - thankfully - I decided on this instead.
Good choice, Johnny
I had a chat with my friend (in-a-distant-networked-sort-of-way) Scott (who persists in lecturing me on the merits of Paul McCartney and forcing me - yes, FORCING ME to listen to the stuff) the other day about levels of maturity and I came to the conclusion that
a) I've never matured b) I'm really only chronologically gifted and c) that I've never really grown up.
Which segues us nicely into Springsteen live in Dublin.
Listen to this album and you'll realise that Springsteen is truly a folk singer, relating stories of his life in the same way that the miners in West Virginia or the sailors of the New England coastline did of theirs.
Thank you for introducing me to a band as good as Attack in Black.
Punk? Yes a bit. Alt.? A lot.
Sounds (I know one doesn't say this, but anyway..) a lot like Wilco/Nine Days/Uncle Tupelo/Son Volt, which means that I don't listen to much else at the moment.
I didn't have the stomach for 1975 this week and 1976 looks even worse - depending on whose version of the Billboard Top 100 you look at, it's either "Silly love songs" (at least agree with me on this one, Malchus...) or "Tonight's the night". (There is a special corner of Hades with your name on it for this one, Rod....)
Not that 1972 is a LOT better. The mediocrity of the period is just so utterly numbing and if I'm honest, I don't recall a lot of the stuff I've forced myself to listen to. A psychological or otherwise spring-cleaning appears to have taken place in the grey matter department, for which I'm frequently grateful. Especially in this case.
Apart from the "Best", there are some gems sprinkled liberally around the nether regions of the chart - Al Green, Derek and the Dominos, Don McLean
As for the rest, it's wall-to-fucking-wall Carpenters, Godspell and the Rick Springfields of this world. And the Osmonds, of whom Dave Marsh wrote in the first edition of the "Rolling Stone Record Guide" such truths as "Well-crafted garbage - trash is too elevated a description". Or "The only people I've ever heard who deserved Andy Williams. Sometimes I wish they'd learn to ski, and meet his ex-wife"
Marc Bolan deserves no better for what he did to the gentle, wonderfully sensitive John Peel, who supported him in the early days, taking Bolan and the band along to DJ gigs and kickstarting them on the road to fame and then get dropped. Bastard. Some people (and this possibly redeems Rod, who was best man at John Peel's wedding) stayed true. Here's Ron talking about John Peel and here's the Top of the Pops clip of "Maggie May" he refers to.
The boy must have got a synthesiser for Christmas and found the sheet music of Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring". I wish he hadn't. Puerile stuff, totally lacking in emotion.
(The Byrds do it a sort of justice in the bridge of "She don't care about time". My mate Graham Horne - pictured in 1965, school uniform and all - picked up on that. Well, someone who played pedal-powered church organ - and snuck bits of "Like a Rolling Stone" into the hymns would, wouldn't they?)
I can live with the real Seekers. They were deservedly huge in the 1960s. (And wasn't that Judith Durham a cracker....?) Talk about the Midas touch. When they released a single, it was a question of who was going to be #2. (I was staying with friends in Whangarei when "The Carnival is Over" was released and another schoolmate, Larry Elliott, who was working as a sound engineer at 1XN - now he's an Acoustician...- got me - the guy from the Big Smoke - on a panel on a radio show to pick the hits of the week.
I trotted out some trivia that had anchored itself in my brain about the Russian folk song melody that they'd nicked bla bla bla and the locals looked suitably impressed at that, so I made a rash prediction that this would be #1 within a matter of days. The only record they released NOT to make it to #1 in New Zealand. #2. Shows you how much I know...
The New Seekers, on the other hand, were dire - music hall/game show tripe. My cousin, Dave, was a fan. Even got their autographs. I've worried about him ever since.
Dick H had a pet theory as to how they got the singer to emit that inane high-pitched bleating "I reckon that have someone stand being him in the studio and grab him by the balls at 2:02 (and 2:08. And 2:15.) I'll show you..." "Fuck off, Dick..." "You just look at the credits on the album cover. I bet you they've got "Fred Blogs - Balls Squeezer" there somewhere."
Rick Nelson was always one of those Fabian/Paul Anka/Dion/Cliff Richards-clones-to-be-ignored for me, but this one hits all the right buttons. The Trivia Button, f'rinstance. Got booed off stage in Madison Square Gardens when he turned up with long hair to play his country music. Wrote this song. "If memories are all I sing, I'd better drive a truck"
You have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA of what a kerfuffle Alice Cooper caused in the UK. Defenders of Public Morals demanding his castration, questions in Parliament, that sort of stuff. I loved him. This blasting in the car on the way to the White Lion of a Sunday evening to listen to the Jug Band was as good as it got.
"We've got got no class And we've got no principles (principals) We can't even think of a word that rhymes"
I'm sure that I was even aware of this song until years later. What a waste. It defines groove and coolness for me.
#92 Doctor my eyes - Jackson Browne I know exactly where I was when I heard the single: Lufthansa Traffic Office at Heathrow. From that moment on, Jackson Browne could have sold shat in a paper bag and I would have bought it. (Later, in fact, he did trying selling something distinctly along those lines, but I was older and wiser and didn't fall for the trick)
Not that I actually like this one, but any song that wins me 6 bottles of Black Sheep ale is worth a spin. Famous potter Jane Hamlyn reckoned it was Cat Stevens, I said it wasn't. I won. Ha!
Just listen to this amazing tape of Air Traffic Control at JFK.
"What happened? You're all out of sequence...Hang on a second, guys...I don't know how that happened... Now I'm all screwed up. Are you where I told you to go?"
He's a candidate for canonisation with some people.
Dave Marsh thinks differently in his comments on the New York Times' obituary in 2002 and closes his column fittingly with the words "Sometime soon, we need to figure out why it is that, when it comes to cultures like those of Mississippi black people, we celebrate the milkman more than the milk." Be that as it may.
Smokie, the band that backed Peter Noone (of Hermann's Hermits fame) in the early 70's and who - if there were any justice in the world - should have sunk without trace?
But then again, you probably live in the States and were lucky enough not to have been exposed to the lethal doses of them that I had to endure
They're still around - you can't go to a bierfest without either them or the Rubettes or the Tremeloes or some other geriatric crew lip-synching to a bunch of sing-along/clap-along ditties for the Metronomes
"Living next door to Alice", for example
And then, of course, there's Gompie.
They took the melody and some of the lyrics and ...shall we say? .... modified them slightly.
It was the sort of song that played at every party, every disco, every football stadium and mainstream radio played it to death.
Content warning?
Offensive lyrics?
Over here?
In Germany?
NPR (or its local equivalent) regularly plays Zappa's "Bobbie Brown" and no-one complains to the protectors of public morals or even bats an eyelid....
So here - for your listening pleasure and amusement - is
Someone sets off a firecracker a bit too close to the neighbour's dog, neighbour gets shirty, words are exchanged, angry silence ensues with a lot of behind-the-hand muttering until some young hothead gets the wrong end of the stick, decides to take matters into his own hands and - being a distinctly bad aim - pops off the wife of the head of the neighbouring clan by mistake.
Not a good move.
This is not the Hatfields and McCoys. This is the Pelle-Romeos and the Nirta-Strangios in Calabria.
Hothead - never the sharpest knife in the drawer - sees the error of his ways and decides to skedaddle to a quieter location until things die down a bit and aforementioned HOTNC gets over it.
Being a bit of a lad, Hothead decides to engage in a touch of weapons smuggling and cocaine dealing to pass the time, unfortunately attracting the attention of the far-flung mates of HOTNC.
Not good news for Hothead, who's out celebrating his birthday with 5 of his mates.
Not good news for his 5 mates,either.
They end up as collateral damage on a street in the middle of Duisburg one night last week.
That's the official story.
I think it was mass suicide.
I reckon they'd been out celebrating, got into the car and one of them says "Let's listen to this CD of Italian songs that the wife got free with a women's magazine."
20 seconds into the first track, they're out of the car, weapons drawn and taking the easy way out.
It's truly awful. The only reason I'm still here is the lack of appropriate weaponry.....
Disclaimer: The author is not responsible for any consequential physical or mental damage as a result of his providing the aforementioned music (although that's debatable) for public consumption.
You'll have to buy the album to listen to "New Mexico" with Eric and Ronnie. The assumption is that it's Clapton and Wood.
And Smokie doesn't really rehabilitate itself with the knowledge that "Lay back (in the arms of someone)" - also on the album with even a classic Motown track - was written by Danko and Bobby Charles, but at least Rick got the royalties....
Plus "High on a mountain" from Ollabelle's "Riverside Battle Songs".
Owning up to reading "The Spectator" probably outs me as the right wing, foaming-at-the-mouth conservative that I'm actually not.
My (perhaps weak) excuse is that it's comforting to read about other peoples' similar experiences in an increasingly frustratingly politically correct world, over proportionally populated by people who either don't (or can't) think or can think and employ their grey matter to piss one off.
"I'm off to the 'Empty Quarter' on the borders of Oman and the Yemen. It should be fabulous - my wife gets to dry out our house and I get to play at being Wilfred Thesiger.
Sadly it's not going to impress anyone at the US embassy next time I need a visa. Not only was I horn in Beirut but I already have potentially offensive (to the US) stamps in my passport from Syria, Iran, Libya, Morocco, China, Egypt, Russia, Vietnam and India ~among many others. Last time I had an interview, the woman looked at my (thick) file and saw that I spoke French and Arabic.
She actually asked me the question, 'Why do you speak these languages?'
It was so much like a scene that Bill Hicks, the much missed US comedian, described in a waffle house somewhere in the southern United States. He's sitting in there reading a book and the waitress approaches him in some confusion. He looks up and she asks hint - 'What you readin' for?' He muses that he's often been asked what is he reading, but never what for. His answer is perfect and to the point - 'Well. I guess it's so I don't ever become a waffle house waitress.'
I've never dared try a similar approach with the US authorities."
Me neither, but I've often been sorely tempted at times.
In Los Angeles, for example.
Get off the plane to be confronted by a cordon of police, arms akimbo and looking about as menacing as they intend to be.
Look at the immigration form (which I've filled in, saying that I'm travelling on to New Zealand on the same day) and ask "Why are in the United States?" "Because the fucking plane can't fly there non-stop" Actually, I said something along the lines that I'm in transit and flying out later that night.
This repeated itself FOUR TIMES.
At one stage and in a serious state of frustration, I said " I'm in transit - just like it says on the form" and got a "Don't-get-smart-with-me-or-I'll-declare-you-to-be-an-enemy-combatant" look for my troubles.
I mean - how much of a danger is there that a middle-aged airline executive is going to go to ground and start picking lettuces in the San Joaquin Valley with the rest of the illegals....?
There are some blatantly obvious "should have been melted down" candidates, but the list underwent some serious pruning
Tony Orlando TWICE. Donny Osmond AND The Carpenters. John Denver. Gilbert O'Sullivan TWICE.
But here are my candidates for the furnace
#1 - Tony Orlando & Dawn - Tie A Yellow Ribbon Stuart W used to sit at one end of the living room in Doghurst Avenue in Harlington with an airband scanner warbling in one ear and crap like this blasting away in the other. The conversation went something like "Stuart, could you turn that down please?" "WHAT" Wop, the mynah bird, would chime in with "Shut the fuck up, Wop" (Can't imagine where it got that from.) We'd respond with Shut the FUCK UP, Wop" (oh, OK...) It'd could go on like that for hours...
#5 - Paul McCartney & Wings - My Love How can someone who had so much promise and talent sink to this turgid stuff? Supports my thesis that the only Beatles stuff truly worth listening to is Lennon's.
#18 - Sweet - Little Willy This could get indelicate. Definitely NSFW. You had NO IDEA what this was about, did you. Lyrics Vault might save embarrassment here. (And you wonder why I snigger at the film about that killer whale in Oregon.
#72 - Gilbert O'Sullivan - Clair I used to share with a guy whose name I've forgotten - used to write horrendously bad science fiction and get drunk on half a pint - but the odour from his sneakers haunts me to this day. Odour doesn't do it justice. It was an abattoir/Mumbai sewer symbiosis stench. An olefactory counterpoint to Tony Orlando, in fact.
#99 - Donny Osmond - The Twelfth Of Never Aaaaaargh! Nooooo! Put me on the rack! Please pull out my nails! Feed me to the lions! But not this....! I'll talk, I'll talk...
#96 - Edgar Winter Group - Free Ride I played Frankenstein through headphones to the on-again-off-again airline CEO back then. You should have seen his eyes swivelling in their sockets when it switched from the left channel to the right channel and back again in rapid succession. Probably caused brain damage. Which would explain a lot.
#85 - Rolling Stones - Angie The centre-right party in Germany chose this as the anthem for Angela Merkel, their candidate for the chancellorship in 2005. Now, if there's anyone who's less Stones and less "Angie" than her, I'd like to meet them... Don't misconstrue this into thinking that I don't rate her - I do, she's a class act - but hip, she ain't.
Just who the fuck is Jud Strunk? And what gives him the right to serve up lyrics like
He remembers the first time he met her He remembers the first thing she said He remembers the first time he held her And the night that she came to his bed
On reflection, I think there should be 6 of the worst this week...
Planning to drive overland to Europe in a Ford Falcon stationwagon in 6th Form Physics class with Graham Horne and Bruce Hales. Making a "Top 10 of All Times" list with Dave Ives at Gerber Foods in London.
Casey over at "The College Crowd Digs Me" has a nice "Best of the unknown Jackson Browne" mix up there today.
Here's a truly great video from a concert in Chicago in 1976, shortly after the release of "The Pretender", with the very wonderful David Lindley on blue fiddle - quite Chagall-esque when you think about it, in fact.
I have no idea who makes up the rest of the band - no Lee Sklar, no Russ Kunkel? What's the world coming to....?
Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, once wrote that the extraordinary Richard Feynman was "half-genius, half-buffoon", but later revised this to "all-genius, all-buffoon".
He should know - he was the guy who demonstrated in 1949 the equivalence of the formulations of quantum electodynamics that existed by that time, resulting in the joint award of the Nobel Prize of Physics in 1965 to Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga.
My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans.
They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand.
It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.
A 45 minute 2001 interview of an exquisitely polite Dyson, generously tolerating a hopelessly inept Robert Wright
No nonchalantly sneaking in with CDs tucked away in your jacket pocket, no feigned innocence when you're grilled about where the house-keeping money went this week
"You haven't been buying CDs again, have you? as an overture to a Force 9 on the Richter scale rant about fiscal responsibility.
With vinyl,you look your obsession in the eyes. Without blinking, head held high.
You carry your purchases proudly through the front door (mostly anyway - I'll admit to have found temporary storage in the garage during times of financial crisis until the coast's been clear..) and say excitedly "Look what I discovered today" to a mostly indifferent and (frequently)mildly belligerent audience.
We are the cultural safety net. We rescue Marc Benno and Leon Russell albums from cut-out bins. We provide homes to Smokie Hogg and Charlie Bradix on "Texas Blues -Anthology Series Volume 5"
We are the WWF of popular music, rummaging through CD jungles to stumble over Chris Rea's "Deltics" - corner clipped to denote a record destined for the knackers' yard - and discover the exquisite "Cenotaph-Message from Amsterdam".
We're prepared to pay $130 for the sublime and unquestionably ego-less Albert Lee in "Head, Hands and Feet". Or $70 for 5th Estate's "Ding dong, the witch is dead"
(And if someone's digitised them........please...?!)
My teen years slotted neatly into the 1960s. Vinyl defined my life.
We had a couple of record stores in Auckland - Marbecks (still there, same location in Queen's Arcade, now with an e-shop) and Lewis Eady (long gone) plus the department stores - John Courts, Milne & Choyce and Smith & Caughey (the latter still there and still as upper-class as ever).
And 246 at 246 Queen St. New Zealand's first shopping centre. 3 floors, Scandinavian furniture store, book shop, HMV record shop, menswear with cool stuff, coffee shop. That's where I lived on Friday nights . Late opening. Until 8 o'clock.
My pocket money went on books and singles, with LPs - Beatles mostly - turning up on birthdays and at Xmas.
("The Byrds' "Tambourine Man" was an exception - I saved for weeks for that one.)
Some of them in stereo, even. (You had a choice - take the mono version, or wait 2. Or 3. Or 4 weeks until a stereo pressing arrived from England.)
The limited library wasn't really a big constraint - there was always Graham Horne, Bruce Hales, Martyn Jones, Maurice Dagger or Greg Wade (or their siblings) who'd have something else, so we'd head over to the Hornes' basement or the Dagger's dirt floor garage on Saturdays with our records under our arms, girlfriends tagging along and play them all again and again and again and do the Twist or the Shrug or the Jerk or whatever was new on 6 week-old broadcasts of Shindig (not that we knew the names - we'd just copy.)
And that was pretty much it before I left New Zealand in 1969
The serious collecting started when I got to the UK and has continued pretty much unabated since, with the Lufthansa crews who lived in the same apartment block getting lists of "Essential", "Important" and "If you have space" to bring back from JFK or LAX.
And then tracks moved onto the Mix and Match tapes to play in the car on the way to work (or anytime, actually) and they became such a part of my life - to the end of my days, when I hear "Lido Shuffle" I'll expect Bap to segue in with "Bedde"- that I saw it as MY DUTY to preserve them for posterity.
Steinberg's Clean 5, WaveLab a USB pre-amp and weeks later, I've got them in a mostly listenable condition in iTunes. (And I need something as good for Mac)
You have to understand. In those days, needles didn't get changed, records got stacked on each other without the cover, beer (if we were at Maurice's place - thanks for that, Mr Dagger..!) got splattered over them, Daggers' garage dirt floor was .. a dirt floor - these things happen - until they sounded like .. well...this.
"Like a Rolling Stone" took me 2 hours and God knows how many iterations to clean up. Surgically removing nano-second clicks with a cursor as a scalpel and performing cosmetic surgery with the "Extrapolate" tool.
And don't talk to me about CDs. (Although I've got more than too many..) Vinyl is where music, art and writing coalesce. You sit back in your chair, listening to the music and looking at good, LARGE FORMAT artwork and quirky (or otherwise) liner notes (some of them even urbane..), reading the lyrics and seeing who played on which track without having to flip through a booklet that's so thick that you can't wedge it back into the jewel case.
Vinyl's healthy, too.
You can't become a couch potato. You're up and down like a bloody jack-in-the box....
Vinyl covers are historical documents.
In the year that Paperback Writer/Rain came out (1966), a transistor radio cost £29/18/6 in pre-decimal New Zealand. I was getting 9s a week pocket money back then.
And a one way "Young International" ticket to Europe cost $318 in 1968. About 10 weeks gross salary for me at the time.
And then there's shellac.
I haven't got my grandfather's collection - they and the gramophone went to Ken Mac, farmer, his closest neighbour (about 5 miles down the road, actually) in North Yorkshire.
But I've picked up some bits and pieces over the year.
Some on flea markets in England, some in Mumbai in Chor Bazaar and a lot from Meher, also in Mumbai.
Which explains why Ricky Nelson's there with "Travellin' Man".
And I've got an HMV wind-up gramophone that weighs an absolute ton from the shopping arcade in the Oberoi Sheraton in Mumbai with a HUGE fucking megaphone that I - get this - HAND-CARRIED back to Frankfurt. In Economy.
So today, I dusted it off, replaced the old with a new Long Playing Steel Needle, Made in England, cranked the handle, removed the original cover from Waldren's in Hounslow and gently placed
Starke's "With Sword and Lance" Recorded in a Concert hall in 1932
on Regal Zonophone Conducted by James Oliver
and Played by Grand Massed Brass Bands
Including St Hilda's Professional Band; Edmonton Silver Prize Band;
G.C. and Met. Silver Prize Band; Stoke Newington British Legion Band
on the turntable, released the brake, placed the needle in the groove.
Delving around in the murky depths of Bittorent for some Abba (no, they DON'T feature prominently in my record collection..) for the Waterloo post, I stumbled across Billboard's Top 100 for 1974.
#1 was Barbra Streisand with "The way we were".
The Love Unlimited Orchestra at #3
Ray Stevens at #8
But there's some truly dire stuff tucked away in there....
A lot direr than those three.
#18 - John Denver - Sunshine on my shoulder
I once worked with a contractor who listened to John Denver AND Nana Mouskouri. Exclusively. Sad case. I refused to drive anywhere with him. #46 - Paper Lace - The night Chicago died
I have absolutely no idea who could possibly have bought this record. #55 - Barry White - Never, ever gonna give you up
This is like a bad dream. I was in Hong Kong that year, looking for Bonnie Raitt's stuff. Very obscure at the time. I'd say "Bonnie Raitt", they'd understand "Barry White". It's horrible. It sounds like he's constipated.
#86 - Sister Janet Mead - The Lord's Prayer
This is beyond me. #97 - Olivia Newton-John - I honestly love you
Big spit/technicolour yawn/talking into the big white telephone stuff. Worthless.
(When I was copying the files to the server, the "Move to trash" option was so close as to be so very tempting. Actually, Paul Anka's "You're having my baby" doesn't deserve to be heard ever again. Click.)
And some good - if not great - stuff.
Apart from Steely Dan with "Rikki don't lose that number", Joni Mitchell "Help me", Maria Muldaur "Midnight at the oasis", Tod Rundgren "Hello. it's me" and the ever-excellent Aretha Franklin with "Until you come back to me", there are such minor (and major) gems as
#31 - Ringo Starr - You're sixteen
Christmas 1974 at my Uncle John's (Group Captain, RAF retd, OBE) place, with him standing there, a goonish grin on his face, swaying to the music and repeatedly saying "This is great, John. Play it again. And have another gin and tonic" Yes it is and I don't mind if I do.
#64 - Golden Earring - Radar Love
These guys didn't speak English. Did the lyrics phonetically. Deserves higher than #64 just for effort.
#77 - Paul McCartney and Wings - Jet I dislike McCartney intensely, but this makes it for NOT sounding like Macca. If only he could play the fucking bass halfway decently...
#79 - Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells
Ah, yes! The climax of ANY party at Shelley Crescent in Hounslow, with everyone playing a different instrument at 4 in the morning and Pete saying "And I'm playing the tubular bells"
I'm to this day ambivalent to the point of utter bipolarity about the Carpenters.
I know I should absolutely despise their saccharine-sweet, squeaky-clean image and THE TEETH and the general meaninglessness of their body of work - Close to you, Sing-a-song, There's a kind of hush et al - (and I do, I do...!) but there's something about the purity and strength and warmth in Karen Carpenter's voice and some of their choice of material that overrides that deep loathing.
I played "Goodbye to love" to my mate Paul Duke (RIP) once and he looked bewildered and stammered "You? The Carpenters?".
Yes. Me. The Carpenters
So if it's only for Tony Peluso's stunning fuzz guitar breaks that don't seem to want to end (and got the song banned from AOR radio, which is recommendation in itself) , give it a listen. Or for the hauntingly tragic and prophetic lyrics of "No-one ever cared if I should live or die"
It's one of the greats.
And anything's better than Leon Russell's original reading of "A song for you".
The excellent Dubber at New Music Strategies will doubtlessly approve of my hijacking his strapline for this one...
The Crocodile Dundee mugging incident comes to mind: "That's not a knife... THIS is a knife..." As in "Google Docs isn't word processing... THIS is word processing"
It's so utterly intuitive and feature-rich, even in Preview 4 (which they've generously allowed me to test drive).*
Menus slide open when you need them, comment call-outs work like they're meant to and document management is a dream
Sort alphabetically, by author, role, creation date, review date or size. And see a document summary without having to burrow through drop-down options. And the huge benefit is its easy management of document collaboration. If we'd had this when I was working on proposals - contributions streaming in from all over the globe at all times of day and night (mostly night...) - I'd have more hair.
And what's left wouldn't be grey.
Can I foresee a life without Word? Almost.
Will I still need offline word processing ability? Probably.
How much of my text stuff will I do with Buzzword? About 95%.
'nuff said. *They wanted a good reason why I should permitted to tread their - virtual - hallowed halls. I gave them the usual YMBFA drivel, and it worked..
Orphaned at an early age, grandparents - childless, unfortunately - went down with the Titanic. Promised to tell others in my geriatrics water polo group, all of whom appear to be early adopters of cutting-edge technology. All have laptop cradles on our Zimmer-frames
I once worked with a guy back in the 1970s who went on to be immensely famous as CEO of a fairly major airline.
(And then not.)
But that's a different story.
Appalling musical taste, but we were still pretty good mates.
As in "play-some-tennis-kick-a-football-around-the-local-ground-go-home-drink-a-bottle-of-gin" mates.
He even moved into our house (shared with a couple of other airline guys and a very spoiled mynah bird called Wop, who had the Financial Times to shit on and picked up "Shut the fuck up, Wop" quite quickly) for a while and the "drink-a-bottle-of-gin" skills were, of course, quite useful.
If not essential.
But musically, he was useless.
Dicky H asked him - about 20 seconds after he's moved in - what sort of music he liked.
"Oh, heavy music", he said.
Dicky looks like he's just won the Pools.
"What, like Uriah Heep, Atomic Rooster, Wild Turkey? That sort of stuff?" with an expectant tone. Like "too good to be true" tone.
"Noooh" he said teutonically. "I like Beethoven. And Wagner"
Blank looks all around.
Quick scan of the dictionary reveals that "heavy" is synonymous with "serious" in German.
So that ruled music out as a topic of serious conversation.
I don't think he'd ever bought a record in his life.
So we talked about football and birds. Mostly birds.
And Dicky and I kept on listening to Uriah Heep, Atomic Rooster, Wild Turkey, Free, Rod Stewart, Vinegar Joe.
Stuart W, Wop's owner, listened to Middle of the Road, Tony Orlanda and Dawn and that sort of stuff.
Not much use, either.
But when it came to pulling birds, this guy had the most upfront, outrageously successful chat-up line
"I bet you haff never made lerve to an Orrstrrian", he'd say
We couldn't believe it!
Won't say it worked every time, but a bloody sight more often than
"Ever shagged a Kiwi?"
Which was utterly unsuccessful.
As was "You don't happen to like Joni Mitchell, do you?". which was Dicky's line.
Or "You wouldn't happen to have any food, would you, dear?". Dave W's line
Then this guy buys a record .
Abba wins the Eurovision Song Contest in April 1974 with "Waterloo".
A truly great song. (And wasn't that blond Swedish bird in the band a cracker. Bloody hell!)
And he thought it was excellent, too.
"I shall buy ziss rrrecord" he announced.
No-one had the vaguest explanation for this epiphany, but it was a step in the right direction.
So off he heads to Hounslow on Monday afternoon and proudly returns with a 45 that he pops on the turntable.
Waterloo, Waterloo Where will you meet your Waterloo? Every puppy has its day Everybody has to pay Everybody has to meet his Waterloo
And they " examined the ways in which quite mundane events such as borrowing a newspaper or spilling a cup of water were potentially integrative (or divisive) and how such encounters were then handled by customers"
As in "Go forth and copulate, that's my copulating newspaper", perhaps? And they're a vital part of our public life "where we encounter people who are neither our family and friends nor our colleagues at work"
Amazing.
Even more amazing is the fact that they made do with a mere £200,000 grant from the Economic and Social Research Council who are "an independent organisation, established by Royal Charter, but receive most of our funding through the Government's Office of Science and Innovation."
So - er - that would be £200,000 of taxpayers money to tell us that "the barista has emerged as a new form of public personality who de-anonymises our daily life in the city, as well as being a skilled maker of expresso-based drinks"?
Somewhere around 1969/1970, I shared a flat in Clapham (Sarf London) with 3 guys - Chris D, John Mc and Peter S.
Bloody tiny place.2 rooms plus kitchen and bathroom.
Not 2 rooms plus 2 bedrooms plus kitchen plus bathroom.
2 rooms plus kitchen and bathroom. Euphemistically called a "garden flat", which meant it was virtually subterranean.Cue for a song.
I moved out west in 1970 and we sort of kept in touch and then didn't (as one does. Or doesn't)
And then I get an email from Chris D, who's still flogging carpets for a living and pretending sales is a really tough job, when we all known that it really only involves is taking your customers out and getting them and yourself pissed.
He must be really good at the former, anyway, because he's got this mansion on the edge of the Cotswolds and I'm glad to see that he appears to be doing very nicely indeed. Anyway, we get around to reminiscing about old times as one does at our age and he mentions the Beatles story which is a bit worrying, because I didn't have a clue what he was on about and you do tend to think your mind's going on occasion.
I remembered the whorehouse in the flat above us featuring a bevy of West Indian beauties and the couple in the flat above the whorehouse who went to Europe for the first time and - seeing duvets (also for the first time) - complained that the beds hadn't been made and John Mc's 21st birthday party to which he invited Princess Anne (who surprisingly didn't front up) and at which I got immensely drunk and disappeared, to be found sometime later pelting passing cars with snowballs made from the first snow I'd seen in my life and Peter S's sexual exploits with all and sundry.
But I didn't remember the Beatles bit.
Chris tells the story thus:
Re Beatles When we first moved in to Gauden Road there was a smell of incense , you may recall that they went through their meditation period with the Maharaja or whatever his name was, anyway it turned out that our place in Gauden Road was used as a temple with the fab four regular visitors. When we first moved, in we were going through the cupboards and there were several returned cheques, as was the normal practice in those days; when the cheque had been cashed they returned it to you for your records.
THERE WERE CHEQUES FROM ALL FOUR OF THEM & WE THREW THEM AWAY!!!!!
(Must go and have a lie down)
Bloody hell, I would too.
Not sure what sombre music would be appropriate - Lowell George's "Easy Money"?
Good choice, Johnny
