One Break, comin' up...

It's Country Music Time Again!

I'm completely serious about my offer to pay good American money to the United States Air Force for access to their archive of "Country Music Time" recordings. Of course, this is probably just the sort of thing that they don't have anymore. I hope I'm wrong, and that these tapes are in a vault in the Pentagon somewhere, but I think that the armed services of the United States may have a few things that they consider more important than maintaining a library of country music recordings. Based on the label and enclosed program sheet for this record, spell checking is not one of those things. Remember, there is only one "e" in "Ferlin Husky" and it's in his first name.



The other artist here is Billy Walker. Who had a pretty spectacular career, but you never really hear much about him anymore.



Here's the program sheet for these two shows (a scan is also included in the download).



I haven't done anything to these files, so they still sound like you're listening to a 40+ year old record. Because you are.

Here's the thing you click on to download this record.

January 4th, 1997

We are all going to die.

My friend Phil wrote something on the internet that actually shocked me a little. He said that people who talk about the 90's now are the same as people in the 80's who talked about the 60's. Oof. But it's true. Here's a picture of me talking to a friend about the first Snapcase album:


As soon as I got home yesterday, there was another artifact of the past on the doorstep. A record had arrived in the mail of some of those "great songs we used to groove to back then". And while it wasn't Freedom Rock, it was a record that is older now than the music being sold on the Freedom Rock compilation was when it was first advertised.

I'm referring to the MTS Records re-issue of The Age of Quarrel by the Cro-Mags. It's a good record, and you should go and buy a copy right now. (Collector scum footnote: I got the second most limited pressing, the red/black swirl. I could have gotten the limited-to-100 black pressing, but I'm a sucker for colored vinyl.)


So much of the music I listen to now is a total nostalgia trip. I'm okay with this, I guess, because I have a choice to listen to modern music, and I don't (well, I do, but not as often as I don't). There's something that I could write, and it's a thing that I actually started writing before I changed it to what you're reading now about how I got to the point of thinking about music basically all the time. And I'll write it sometime and it'll bore the hell out of you because it'll be just another hippie droning on about how there's no way you could understand the groove of Woodstock because you weren't there man.

In the song "Clenched Fists, Black Eyes" Kevin Seconds sings that "we're aiming for a different goal / succeeding where the hippies failed". Did it work? I don't know. That's up to the next generation to decide, just like it was up to old dudes like Kevin Seconds (and me) to decide that the hippies had failed. I've got a feeling that my son will be able to reference a song that speaks pretty bluntly about the failures of old people like his dumb old dad. That's as it should be. I can't wait to hear it.

Of Zeroes and Heroes

Some things happen.

So this "blog" is kind of stupid. I started it over three years ago as a kind of excuse to post things that I thought were "interesting" that I had around the house.

Then it kind of maybe turned into an "mp3 blog" for a while and then it stopped being anything at all. I guess I have recently had a hankerin' to once again write about things on the internet in ways that are neither limited to 140 characters nor appearing on a "wall" or in a "news feed", so here I am.

I have, you've probably noticed, changed the url of this place to something quite cumbersome and difficult to remember, so I guess I'm limiting myself once again. Anyway, thanks for showing up. I can't promise things here will get any less stupid. I can only promise to make a half-hearted attempt to make them happen a little more frequently.

Tell all your friends!

George Jones and Melba Montgomery - "Blue Moon of Kentucky"

I'm just sitting around this morning not really doing anything at all, and I'm listening to this record. It's a really good record to listen to while you're just sitting around on Sunday morning and not doing anything, so I wanted you to have the same ability.

So, here it is. There's a skip in the song "Before She Changed Your Mind", but we're not really the kind of people who care about things like that, are we?