Oliver Humanzee

Poor Ringo. The poem he is paraphrasing is by WH Auden. It goes: Let us honor if we can The vertical man Though we value none But the horizontal one. That's it. That's the poem. It was the epigraph to his 1930 collection Poems and dedicated to his collaborator and lover Christopher Isherwood. Auden was a master at loading simple rhyming couplets with two or even three meanings and of the several ways to read this dedication to his lover, none are about clean living. From the same collection of poems we are also given this lewd, darkly comic gem, which I include here only because it cracks me up. As the poets have mournfully sung, Death takes the innocent young, The rolling-in-money, The screamingly-funny, And those who are very well hung.

Just finally caught up on this thread. Nothing much to add just yet. But this OH guys seems like a real schmuck.

Smug Guitar Center shredder MIDI-rack ponytailed libertarian dildos who are exactly as dopey as Rush's dopey lyrics. You know--Rush fans.

You know that you don’t have to lend voice to your every thought, right? It’s okay to not post sometimes.

5.24. Neil Young & Crazy Horse — Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere Another NY&CH record has my favorite NY&CHsong on it, but this is a better record and can any song be THAT much better than “Down By the River”? Of course it can’t, dummy. I’ll add links in a minute.

I’m pretty good friends with the Heed actor’s brother. Hung out with him a bit at his brother’s wedding, which was at some Irish American Heritage Center or something in Chicago was attended by more cops than a Alderman’s funeral. He’s a nice guy, though, Heed is. Name is Matt. Normal sized head IRL.

TV Eye 1970 The sleaziest, filthiest, most oblivion-embracing record yet committed to tape. Utterly American and utterly timeless. Transcendent and transgressive. 7 perfect songs, each of which is responsible for its own subsequent sub-genre of music. I can’t imagine rock without this noise from 1970, and I don’t fuggin’ wanna.

Andrew “Dice” Clay.

Every so often I’m convinced that the Buzzcocks were the greatest rock band in the world. Not a single song during the Shelly era that was less than great. Incredible playing, too.

3.24. Bob Dylan — Highway 61 Revisited From the Kinks imaginary England we go to absurdist landscape of America, as heard through her music, along Dylan’s Highway 61, where we’ll meet local luminaries such as Georgia Sam, Ma Rainey, Beethoven, and a Commander-In Chief who insists that the “sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken”. To quote The Bob: “Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I began. I always felt like I'd started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere, even down in to the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors ... It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood." Who knew that America began in Duluth and ended in amphetamine-fueled blues/garage mayhem? From a Buick 6 Like a Rolling Stone

An old roommate of mine had a small recording studio set up in his basement, where he would record his band, friends bands, and local band demos. One of his few paying clients was a Dylan tribute act called Blood On The Tracks, who spent two whole days recording their hideous versions of Desire/BOTT/Nashville Skyline-era Bob. As this racket was happening about 4 feet below me, I was unable to get any sleep for about 48 hours. Somewhere on the those master tapes you can hear my voice, barely muffled by by sub-flooring and styrofoam paneling, screaming “IF I HAVE TO LISTEN TO THAT #### I SWEAR TO GOD I’LL BURN THIS ####### PLACE DOWN WITH EVERYONE INSIDE.” Which is what I yelled when I heard somebody suggest they try doing their favorite song from Planet Waves.

Appropriate reaction

2.13 The Kinks are The Village Green Preservation Society In 1966 Brian Wilson proved that a pop album could be something greater than a collection of pop songs by creating Pet Sounds—a fully realized baroque masterpiece that invites the listener to inhabit a landscape that would be otherwise impossible to imagine: the embarrassingly guileless world inside Wilson’s head. In 67 Sgt Pepper’s did the same, but instead of mapping the psyche of a real person, we get to travel with carnival-like abstractions of The Beatles, or their idea of their better (or stranger) selves. in 68 The Village Green Preservation Society plunges us into another imagined world: an idyllic England that exists only in the past and only in the imagination of Ray Davies. In his attempt to create a home in an world that he desperately needs to exist, he inevitably describes the large and small failures of the world that we actually inhabit and the contrast between the two generates irony and pathos thick enough to butter your crumpets. We Are The Village Green Preservation Society Picture Book

I yelled it into the ether one night after listening to the whole horrible record whence it comes. Krista wrote it down.

If I'm stuck with only 20 records to listen to for all eternity, I want records that are rich, deep, and that reward repeated listens. The aesthetic of Pet Sounds is so luscious, seamless, and fully immersive that entering it feels like entering another world. I'll have a lot more to say about it later (sorry) but for now here are two songs. God Only Knows You Still Believe In Me