Letters Of Note:5/17/2016

Birthday Power Quartet Of The Day:

Jim Moginie(1956, Midnight Oil mainly but try his weirdo album, The Blessing, he made with some flute player named Andy Richardson that goes by “Howlin’ Wind”…I know, just try it) on guitar, Mark Mothersbaugh(1950, Devo) on drum machine/mechanical percussion, Martika(1969, Kids Incorporated), and Rick Wakeman(1949, Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe) on every keyboard ever made.

They’re not gonna get along. There’s no way. Wakeman’s Twitter handle is @GrumpyOldRick for God’s sake. But as professional musicians, and a pinky swear that Mothersbaugh will only make percussive noises, maybe they could make it through my pick.

My pick is “Spring, Summer, Winter and Fall”, by Aphrodite’s Child. I would ask Martika to do a fake, Brian Ferry-esque accent, but I’ll settle for her just keeping up.

 

Let’s All Die In 2016: Guy Clark

Guy Clark’s death won’t affect many, but most of the unaffected have heard a Guy Clark-penned song and just don’t know it; he wrote music that everyone wanted to record. His most famous works were recorded by superstars like Ricky Skaggs and the country supergroup The Highwaymen, but the biggest gap his passing will leave will be his kinship with the other great songwriters keeping the folk/”old” country traditions alive at the time, like Rodney Crowell, Emmylou Harris, and Steve Earle. He was famously close to Townes Van Zandt, and a good enough friend to Townes to have outlived him. Here’s most of those folks together in Guy’s kitchen from the highly influential Heartworn Highways documentary. RIP.

 

Also Dead: Elvis Presley

If you took a monk from a life of cloistering in the most remote monastery, void of knowledge of world culture and even the most rudimentary information of wellness and medical science, and played this recording to him, he would say “oh Lord, we need to make some sort of facility where this person can convalesce and heal. I hope he’s ok.”

Patton Oswalt does a great bit about how you can hear how fat he’s become by the sound of the “b” words that he says. This is the terminal version of that joke. Still, RIP.

 

Rap Song That Dates Itself By Mentioning The Year Of The Day:

Still a banger.