Mimsy Were the Borogoves

One of the occasional nice surprises of digging through vinyl back in the days before Amazon had everything, and iTunes everything Amazon doesn’t, was occasionally running across a Makem & Clancy album in a thrift shop or the world music section of a dusty record store. I had previously known of the group from a mix tape by a college friend who grew up in Ireland. That tape was a tape of a tape of tapes. As I began to collect the albums, it was a pleasure to both hear more songs, and familiar songs more clearly.

My favorites are:

1. The Makem and Clancy Concert
2. Irish Songs of Rebellion
3. Recorded Live in Ireland!
4. Hearty and Hellish
5. A Spontaneous Performance Recording!

Well, looking up that list on Amazon I see three out of five are still not available, so you may still have to haunt used music stores. But at least the top two are, and my favorite, the Makem and Clancy Concert, includes a version of Get Drunk (I like it better than the video here, but that’s probably because I heard the record version first).

All but Recorded Live in Ireland! are available on iTunes, but you’ll need to search by album title: the group is under at least four different names, making it difficult to find their music.

Part of why the Makem and Clancy Concert is my favorite album is the spirited rendition of Baudelaire’s “Get Drunk” by Liam Clancy. For your inspiration, here is the translation he’s using:

One should always be drunk, that’s all that matters.

So as not to feel time’s horrible burden that breaks your shoulders and bows you down you must get drunk without ceasing.

But what with? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose, but get drunk.

And if at some time on the steps of a palace, or in the green grass of a ditch, or in the bleak solitude of your room you are waking up when drunkenness is already abated, ask the wind, a wave, the star, the bird, the clock, all that which flees, all that which rolls, all that which groans, all that which sings, all that which speaks, ask them what time it is.

And the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will reply “It is time to get drunk! So that you may not be the martyred slaves of time, get drunk, get drunk and never pause for rest. With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose.”

I’ve always liked Ray Stevens. He’s one of the reasons I haunt used record stores. When I was a kid, I enjoyed Gitarzan and Ahab the Arab on Dr. Demento. When I started picking up his albums, I discovered other songs, ranging from Would Jesus Wear a Rolex to Marion Michael Morrison. His humor ranges from musical slapstick to subtly in your face.

For a while, I thought I didn’t like his new stuff. But as they come up in rotation on iTunes, I find I like them more and more each time I listen. He’s a quietly enjoyable country artist and many of his less humorous songs grow with each listen.

I’ve recommended two collections below; I'm not a fan of collections. They almost always exclude lesser known gems, and this is definitely the case here. Among my favorite Stevens’ songs are The Minority, Would Jesus Wear a Rolex, Marion Michael Morrison, and I Saw Elvis in a UFO, which are not on either of these collections. But unless you want to haunt record stores too, collections are the only way to get some of the classics.

Some of the original albums are available on CD. You can still buy Crackin’ Up and Mississippi Squirrel Revival, which you should.

If you want to look for the original albums, here are some of my favorites:

Business lesson: it is generally not a good idea to piss off people with talent and creativity. The Sons of Maxwell will be asked to replay this song long after United settles. The corollary, of course, is that since you don’t know who has talent, you’ll need to treat all of your customers with respect. I generally take their advice: I prefer to drive rather than fly. The airlines don’t care about anything; they don’t care about luggage, they don’t care about being late, and they don’t care about missed connections. I’ve seen “on time” departure listings for flights after they were supposed to have already left. I’ve been held over six hours for a connection to a city only three hours drive away. My rules of flying are (1) don’t fly if I can go some other way, and (2) never fly anywhere requiring a connection. If instead of dropping prices they increased service, I might take them up on flying more often.

Digging through the $1 vinyl section I’ve picked up a lot of artists who’ve had one really good hit before fading into mediocrity. I think one reason is that, at least in the seventies and eighties, artists were afraid to repeat their successes. They were perfectly happy to repeat their generally okay stuff and even their mediocrities, but not their big hits.

Go back and look at the great artists, and they repeated so much there’s a name for it: their “x” period. Picasso had his “blue period”. To take a seventies artist whose second album I just purchased, Asia should have had a “Heat of the Moment” period. The best thing on their other albums is the Roger Dean cover.

Sometimes this failure to repeat successes is, I think, because of a fear of “cashing in”. And also that there’s a responsibility in success that doesn’t exist in failure.

But I suspect that a big part of the problem in music is that groups work a long time on their first album, and are then rushed on the second album by their record company—to whom they’re deeply in debt. And after the inevitable writer’s block, the company starts giving them advice. Left on their own, the artists themselves are more likely to be able to repeat what made their work a success. They have first-hand experience at it, after all. Left to fill in the vacuum, music companies will try, but they’ll focus on irrelevant characteristics. “These songs made us a lot of money. They were about three minutes long on average. All songs should be three minutes long.”

One group I can think of off-hand that had their Heat of the Moment period was Foreigner. Double Vision, head games, and Foreigner 4 were all about them going through their “Feels like the first time” period. They were so successful they lasted until they couldn’t stand each other. If they’d been another band they would have kept repeating “Starrider” until they stopped getting work or bumbled into another hit and then stopped getting work.

When you do something great, do it again. Repeat yourself, at least when it’s your best. Repeating your best work is how you internalize the skills that made them best.

You probably have to remember this song when it originally came out to truly enjoy this spoof, but I have been watching it over and over again for the last two days. It is just amazingly funny. Most of the “literal videos” I’ve seen afterwards are too literal; but Total Eclipse doesn’t just describe, it penetrates to the evil heart of the eighties. A lot of music videos used dream sequences, apparently out of the belief that things don’t have to be coherent in dream sequences. After a while videos dropped the dream sequence pretense because incoherence was the norm. At least this one didn’t have the band randomly pop up with their instruments without any relation to the storyline.

A couple of months ago I was listening to Open Arms on Journey’s Escape, which I had just purchased on cheap vinyl, and a friend of mine asked me why it sounded so warbly. “That’s just Steve Perry,” I said, but it got me thinking; and as it happens I have another copy of Open Arms from the Heavy Metal soundtrack. Sure enough, the warble wasn’t there on the version I’d ripped several years ago from the soundtrack.

I’d noticed recently that my cheap Sony record player had been getting more finicky; certainly it’s provided decent service—I’ve owned it for eight years; and I would never have spent more than a hundred dollars on a record player when I first started listening to vinyl again. I would have just dumped all of my vinyl.

A search on-line indicated that most likely all I needed was a new belt, so I ordered one. After installing the new belt, not only did it continue to warble, but now the speed continuously increased over the course of listening to an album, such that eventually the pitch control couldn’t compensate. What now? Maybe I got the wrong belt? Maybe I need to take a look at the pitch control? How much money do I want to spend on this cheap turntable?

Maybe after listening to vinyl again for eight years, I should get a better turntable? I had a vague idea that if I wanted to find a better record player in my price range, I’d need to look for “direct drive” instead of “belt drive”, and my experience here certainly pushed me away from belts. A search of reviews on-line led me to two turntables: the Audio-Technica PL120 at about $200 and the Technics SL-1200MK2 at about $450.

The price of the Audio-Technica, the fact that it can play 78s at 78 RPM (with a special needle), the built-in pre-amp for when I replace my current stereo, and the initial reviews inclined me towards that one at first. But a deeper search indicated that the PL120 often has a hum that won’t go away and that the pre-amp might not be that great. One thing everyone agreed on: if you like the PL120, you’ll love the SL-1200.

I ended up spending the extra money for the 1200; I don’t want to have to deal with this again. If I really need 78s, I can play them at 45 and speed them up on the computer (78s come in more than one speed so I’d probably have to do this anyway).

Stephen Fry says it better, of course:

What, Apple’s a bigger company than Sony? Got more muscle? What muscle it has got, it got from daring to be better.

It’s a long screed about the good and the bad in the iPhone Killer industry. The very fact that these are “iPhone Killers” a few months after the iPhone’s release should tell us something.

Hat tip to Daring Fireball.

John Gruber adds his voice to the ringtone debate:

The whole ringtones racket is predicated on the notion that ringtones are something different than songs. This notion is bullshit. You don’t turn songs into ringtones; you treat them as ringtones. They’re not even a different file format. It’s just a different context for playing the same song on the same device.

The distinction between ringtones and songs is an artificial marketing construct. It is a misconception, albeit a widely held one, that there is any foundation in copyright law for this, i.e. that an honest consumer is obligated to pay for ringtones separately from “regular” songs for some legal reason. Not so.… If you have the right to play a song, you have the right to use it as a ringtone on your phone.

From the inception of the iTunes Store, Apple has done right by its customers. The iTunes Store was conceived and designed as something customers would enjoy. It competes fairly, both against traditional music sales on physical media such as CDs, and against illegal bootlegging. It can’t beat bootlegging on price, but it can beat it in terms of convenience and user experience.

iTunes’s new ringtone feature, though, is the first time Apple has created a feature that is only usable with iTunes Store tracks. Burning to disc, transferring to peripheral devices such as iPods and Apple TV, playing over the air to Airport Express—in all these cases, the features work with all songs in your library, wherever they came from.

For any song you already own on CD, Apple is asking you to pay three times for it in order to use it as a ringtone on your iPhone: once for the CD you’ve already purchased, again to buy a needless duplicate of the track from the iTunes Store, and a third time to generate the ringtone.

More at The Ringtones Racket.