Now that I’m retired, music I love is taking up more of my time. I’m trying to play more, and learn more, in my lower intermediate rock guitar student way. I’m listening more, especially to bands I neglected in the past (or think the wider culture has neglected).
And I just finished reading This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of A Human Obsession, by Daniel Levitin. One of the saving graces of human beings as a species is music, in all its forms. The book describes how humans are hard-wired for music. We should be grateful for that.
I’ve got shelves of CDs already, and I really don’t need to add to them, but I couldn’t resist buying a few recently.
From Amazon, which has become a major resource, I picked up the first new CD in 20 years from the New Riders of the Purple Sage. It has songs with lyrics by Robert Hunter, famous for his contributions to the Grateful Dead. I’ve never had a CD of theirs or even listened (to my knowledge) to the New Riders, although I know they’ve been around for a long time, but the Robert Hunter connection made me want to check them out.
Another from Amazon is Janis Joplin Live at Winterland ’68 with Big Brother and the Holding Co. This was fairly early in Joplin’s short career, and the band, Big Brother, also shows what it is capable of as one of the original psychedelic outfits. I love Janis in live performance, the rawness and sheer over-the-top passion – I’m thinking now of the Festival Express DVD where she bowls everyone over with her astonishing performances.
And my third CD from the ubiquitous retailer is the Zombies’ Still Got That Hunger. The Zombies, an English band, are famous for their songs from the 60s like Time of the Season and She’s Not There. Pretty long in the tooth, these guys, but I want to hear what they sound like now with new material in this CD from 2015.
The Disappearing CD
It’s harder and harder of course to find CDs at any local storefronts in the Greater Vancouver area. And CDs themselves are apparently slowly on the way out, given the tendency to buy single tunes online or obtain through file-sharing.
But in the little fishing village becoming gentrified that is Steveston (a hamlet within Richmond, BC, home to the Vancouver Airport), there is a small bricks-and-mortar shop called Beatmerchant, where CDs are still sold.
The owner, Frankie Neilson, actually knows a lot about most of the music I love. He worked in the music industry in the UK with Polydor in the 1970s. He relocated to Vancouver in the 1990s after spending some time in Toronto. He started his physical store in 2005.
So from Frankie this week I bought Argus by Wishbone Ash. I have it on an LP but since I almost never get around to hand-cranking my old Kenwood turntable and listening to any of the old long-plays, I decided to get the CD. (You probably don’t know about Kenwood’s series of hand-cranked turntables which required considerable strength just to get going, like a Model T…. OK, just kidding.)
Argus was Wishbone Ash’s biggest album and rose to #3 in Britain in 1972. They were a band playing progressive rock I guess you could say, with folk and classical influences.
Also from Beatmerchant is the 2 CD compilation The Essential Paul Revere & The Raiders. You never hear them now even on so-called classic rock stations, but Paul Revere & The Raiders were big when I was growing up during high school and into the early 1970s. My brothers and I listened to them a lot on our battery-powered Phillips phonograph (since we didn’t have electricity for many years – not kidding).
Some of their early hits include Kicks and Good Thing. They were Columbia Records top-selling rock band of 1967. Later, they shortened their name to The Raiders and had hits with Indian Reservation and Birds of a Feather.
They often liked to wear Revolutionary War costumes….
And finally, Beatmerchant had a DVD I didn’t know existed: Stephen Stills & Manassas – The Lost Broadcasts. Manassas was a band that Stephen Stills formed with some other heavy weights of the time such as Chris Hillman and Al Perkins. Their primary release was a self-titled 2-disc LP in 1972 (mentioned in this post). The group only lasted a couple of years, but I’ve been a fan ever since.
This DVD apparently shows the band performing a number of songs on German television. The YouTube video of It Doesn’t Matter gives you an idea of the band.
So the next step is for me to listen to all this good stuff!
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