Birthday Power Sextet Of The Day:
Jackie Liebesit(1939, Can) and Levon Helm(1940, The Band) on drums, Mick Ronson(1946, most of the successful British talents with highly questionable sexuality) on guitar, Verden Allen(1944, Mott The Hopple) on keyboards, Vernon Allen(1915, various jazz ensembles) on bass, and Lauryn Hill(1975, The Fugees) on vocals.
As long as Lauryn Hill shows up on time(or at all?), this would be a pretty good working group. Unfortunately for Liebesit, he’ll have to play it somewhat straight; I’m picking a typically-long version of The Allman Brothers Band’s “Please Call Home”. Other than Liebesit and Vernon Allen egging each other one to jazz it up a bit, this is the perfect group to let Lauryn Hill shine with the vocals.
(Note: the first ever .mp3s I ever, um, acquired, in the early days of WinAmp, were songs from The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill. So good, miss U gurl.)
Belated Birthday Notes: Hal David
You would think, as a kid starved of pop culture in Eighties, Bible Belt, small-town Arkansas, that every music video offered up on TBS’ Night Tracks would be precious to me. Not so, and I can remember one of the major offenders being the too-adult and not-adult-content-enough-for-perpetually-horny-youths video for “On My Own”, with Patti Labelle and Michael McDonald.
The video is poorly aged cheese, but the actual song is… good? Am I old? God damn, I’m old, aren’t I? The music could be dismissed as double divas over vaporwave fodder synths, but listen to Big Jim Ross holler out, “Good God, that’s Burt Bacharach’s music!”
In the most important era of my musical, and social, growth, I learned to love Burt Bacharach, and by extension the lyrics of Hal David. I am old, but there’s too many great tracks to mention. I watched this particular performance live, and cried like a big liberal baby before he even picked up the harmonica:
I Know You Don’t Believe Me But This A True Story Of The Day:
There was a older couple in the row of chairs facing me at the doctor’s office today. When I say “older”, I mean “hearing impaired to the point that they have grown accustomed to yelling at each other to communicate”. They were talking, at a wincing volume, about all manner of both benign and personal information.
Every once in a while the office door would open, and you could hear the noise of the inner workings of your average medical office, complete with telephone rings, computer clicks, the global FM radio, and the copy machine. The copy machine was the most noticeable, but I didn’t imagine the couple were capable of hearing any of it. I was wrong.
“What in the world is that noise,” the man said, referring to the whirring of the copier.
The woman leaned right into his ear and bellowed, “It’s Journey.”
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