Bobby Hebb "Sunny '76"

Who doesn't love Bobby Hebb's song "Sunny?" Like the best uplifting moments, it comes out of a dark place (in this case his brother's murder a day after JFK's murder), and in this case it includes multiple key changes and a delightful flubbed bass note that I cherish. Turns out the studio musicians were working overtime, so I guess it makes sense, but it's the beauty mark on the face of the song that makes it even greater, the one people don't notice.

I did not know that there was a disco remake, "Sunny '76". Wikkypeeeedia describes it as "reharmonized," which is putting things mildly:

As the millions of readers of this blog know, I love disco revamps, but when I first heard this, I thought the big boogie major chords and swirling disco strings were a step too far for this song's minor-key heart. I felt a visceral distaste for it. But now that I've listened to it a few times, I appreciate how outlandish the changes are. It is gaslighting the listener. Oh, those feelings you had when you heard this? Let me reharmonize them. Quit moping and dance. Totally ridiculous. I kind of love it.

Steem Dekk / Pikuniku / Super Mega

I finally gave in and bought a refurbished Steem Dekk. I had a lot of various bundle Steem games sitting around and wanted something that would travel well from the couch to the TV (for the exercise bike). Turns out it is totally great. I should have jumped earlier. Who knew.

The boy was totally delighted watching me play Pikuniku (I was also delighted to play it) and so now we are hanging out in the hammock playing it again, this time in Spanish. Good translation, if a little Iberian-heavy? Fun to see him reading the Spanish and doing a good job translating it into English. Just amazing. Hooray for the DLI program at his elementary school.

Another game I had kicking around in my account was Super Mega Baseball: Extra Innings. While I have only a scintilla of interest in our national pastime, I have to admit that this scratches a lot of the same itches that Hardball! did back in my Apple //c youth. I play on easy mode (or low "ego" as they put it) and it is chill and silly.

Mdou Moctar / the Resonars / consistency

Everyone is talking about the new Mdou Moctar album, as well they should. I like how they balance their trademark spine-tingling excursions with more intimate moments, and I love that he/they is/are advocating for use of the Tamasheq language instead of the colonial French. (side note: Tifinagh 💕) Sad that their 2024 tour will be skipping our lightly populated quarter of the country.

The new Resonars album sounds like pretty much every other Resonars album, as it should, with the addition of a couple extra-psychedelic synthesizer interludes. As always, instant good times. A bird singing the song it was meant to sing since birth.

I'm a little jealous of people who can consistently make excellent music in a consistent style. I'm like a hummingbird flitting from style to style to sound to sound, always jittery.

 

Striped T-shirts

When I went to pick Jennifer R. up before our show at Mother Foucault's on Friday, I mentioned that I was wearing the same thing I'd worn for a Qostqo run a few minutes earlier. She said, oh, probably a striped t-shirt and shorts? Amazingly I was NOT in fact wearing a striped shirt, but rather this fine number from Made in Milwaukie. That got me to thinking: are striped shirts part of my personal brand at this point?

Like other niche items, striped shirts are not consistently available at mall retail, so I have to go big when they are in fact available. Turns out this is one of those years where the Ggapp is pushing Ghostbusterz shirtz instead of striped tees. Sigh!

Then today I ended up working on a certificate from Güira de Melena, Cuba
(side note: looks pretty awesome, and the BIENVENIDO A GÜIRA DE MELENA sign in this video is super cool)

and anyway, that made me think about Spanish pop group Melenas and then I happened upon this video and was flabbergasted by the guitarist's shirt:

It does not appear to be available anywhere online, so in case anyone is reading this, I would like to summon this exact t-shirt to show up in large quantities on extreme clearance at some store that I know about.

Jody Harris Robert Quine _Escape_ / RYL / late 80s survivors

How had I never heard about Jody Harris/Robert Quine's album Escape? As soon as I heard about it I had to listen to it, and as soon as I listened to it, I heard the distinctive sounds of the Electro-Harmonix DRM-15 (or 16 or 32?) preset drum machine and that was it. Then they started playing alien sped-up guitar and funk bass on top of it. I like it.

Actually it sounds like the Raunchy Young Lepers (at that point just "RYL") were trying to reverse-engineer this album on a crummy boombox on Sex and Heredity. Some of the same beats even. Not that I would know anything about that group, although I am delighted that someone has started selling tea under the name "The Ryl Co." Not that Goat-Boy would have emailed me about that either.

Speaking of things that happened in the late 1980s, I would never have guessed that of all the artists from that era, the one that my seven-year-old would be singing in 2024 would be... Rick Astley?

White Winged Moth / Vacation nightwalks

This morning after not thinking about the artist White Winged Moth for over two decades, I thought about the artist White Winged Moth. Anything on YouChoob? Yes, this:

Whoa, sudden college radio nostalgia feeling, totally crazy! Is this what it felt like when Boomers saw the ad for Freedom Rock?

I think I drove up to Los Angeles to see him/them perform and I feel like I remember seeing people dragging folding chairs around in a dark room. Was that the performance? Was I disappointed? Or elated? 

I looked to see if copies exist on Disqwogz. They do, and they aren't expensive. Weird cardboard-and-elastic Moleskine-evoking packaging - how is that holding up three decades later? One person selling it was clearly a college radio nerd in the late 90s, and the CDs for sale are basically one stratum of padded envelopes that I would have been very happy to see come into the music office. Do I need any of them? No.

NIGHTWALKS DEPARTMENT:
We went to Lincoln City on the beach. After boyo went down for the night, I went to wander through the hills. 

There was a deer by the pickleball courts. I gingerly stepped down the hill to get a closer look and it vanished. 

There's a ditch across from the Surftides resort that erupts with frog song at night - I had completely forgotten about it, but they are louder than ever. Do people hear it from the resort, or is the ocean louder? 

I walked down a hundred steps or so to the ocean. The whitecaps were illuminated by the lights from the resort. A ways down the beach I could see people having a driftwood fire. It looked cozy but then I remembered that I don't like fire. I took a moment to contemplate, think about how small I am against the ocean, and how small I am in time, and then I walked back on the twisty streets to the motel.

Cosmonox / LP bins in 2024

Cosmonox played a show at SE Foster's finest dark void of a music venue, the legendary Starday Tavern. No cover and in a prime pub crawl location. It was fun to see how various stumbling-in drunk randos reacted to this alien tape squawk music. I will spare you the photo, but it involves some very short basketball shorts. My brother was there and journalistically observed the parade of drunks, from "Where do they find these people" to people just totally feeling it and taking phone videos.

My mom watched the boy last night so JL and I went, naturally, to a certain estate sale warehouse in Tigard. We got some glassware. Their LPs were priced at $5 apiece (!!!) but were half off by the time I got there. The left bin was random would-not-sell-at-25-cents records (you can probably picture a lot of them) and classical records, the right bin was mostly Christian music, and the center bin was various picked-over pop-folk stuff. But I was pleased to find, in the middle of all of this, a copy of Richard and Linda Thompson's Pour Down Like Silver. RT's blue eyes staring out at me in the middle of all of this rote flipping. As someone who had only ever played the album on the streamz, I was surprised to see that Linda's portrait appears on the back.

We put our treasures in the hatchback and had an actual date night, with happy hour cocktails even, in the incredible April sun on the mysterious west side of the Willamette.