without The Portsmouth Sinfonia.
This has nothing to do with Xmas, but while I’m in full assault mode, here’s the great Florence Foster Jenkins having at Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” aria from The Magic Flute.
Young Jimi
I’m guessing Buddy & Stacey would not enjoy our trying to look past them.
Forgotten Gem
Probably my favorite EJ song. It’s the second half of a medley that opens Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. It (along with the opening song, the instrumental Funeral For a Friend) got quite a bit of airplay on FM radio when the album was released. This was the glory days of FM, when stations played deep tracks. You never heard it on AM, which stuck to singles. It gets left out of “best of” compilations, and many EJ fans don’t know it. I don’t get why. This song has everything going for it, including a killer bass line. It’s one of the songs I used to teach myself bass when I got one in 10th grade.
Word
Stone vs. Stone
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
Exhibit A: Bob Dylan’s, Keith Richards’ & Ron Wood’s gloriously ragged “Ballad of Hollis Brown” from Live Aid (couldn’t find this song without the cringey sing-a-long at the end). Exhibit B: Same festival: Mr. Showbiz, Sir Mick, preening and prancing, desperate for your approval of him as a solo act. My point? I think it’s interesting that if you take Keith out of the Stones, you still have the coolest guy on the planet. Take out Mick, and he just looks ridiculous. Keith saunters out and owns a stage; Mick has to shake his ass and do calisthenics for it, but even then he needs Keith around looking cooler. Interesting dynamic.
One More Move
Boom!
These young bastards have potential.
Memphis Is Your Vinyl Destination…
…if you want to pay $10 for a K-tel compilation, $34 for an unplayable Monkees album, and $45 for a water-damaged The Wall. And that Leif Garrett album you’ve been jonesin’ for, only $14. Those are just a few of the amazing finds in this video.
La Cathedrale Engloutie
Claude Debussy’s “The Sunken Cathedral” is based on a myth involving, well, a sunken cathedral off the coast of Brittany. The beautiful princess of a prosperous coastal town named Ys had an affair either with Satan or one of his many lieutenants on earth (as beautiful princesses tend to do). As punishment, the town was destroyed by sinking into the sea along with most inhabitants. Local legend held that on certain days you could hear the bells of the cathedral of Ys ringing from below. On other days, it was believed to rise briefly to the surface. Debussy begins by representing both waves and the ringing of the cathedral bells. As the cathedral rises, chanting monks and priests emerge, culminating with the great organ at 2:25: a brief emergence of a grand, underwater zombie Mass of the damned. Then it all sinks again until we just hear the bells. Near the end, the great organ melody makes a muted reappearance from the murky depths.
Beautifully creepy stuff here, with the obsessively perfect Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli looking like he’s playing this from deep within his castle in Transylvania. (He actually never lived in a castle in Transylvania, but for a while he did live in one near Brescia).
Satisfaction?
After 40+ years, this still might be the strangest cover version I’ve ever heard of anything. The re-worked lyrics, where I can understand them, are hilarious. I know only two things about the Residents: they were from San Francisco, and they had a guitarist called Snakefinger. Perhaps former Bay area Bastards can add something. According to the comments, the animation is by Ivan Maximov, a Russian. I don’t know anything about him either. As far as I know, the song and animation are unrelated, but they make a perfect match. Beyond that, words fail me on this one.