Tina, glad you liked the moose. Send me your address & I'll send you a copy. The Woodman doesn't need the royalties. Most comedy recordings are only good for a couple listens (even the good ones), but along with Richard Pryor & the Firesign Theater (which admittedly is in a universe of its own) I can listen to Woody time and time again. His imagination was just amazing, and that's probably why it retains its freshness, but the craft is there, too. The routines are beautifully constructed, his timing is impeccable -- perhaps not surprising in a musician, and he has that great mix of tradition (Bosrcht belt/vaudeville/early tv) and innovation (leaving his mark on the tradition.) "We laughed. And Gertrude Stein punched me in the mouth."

Stay tuned for the big Richard & Linda Thompson post. But first I need food. And coffee.

Awww, Joe, sorry about your back. I'm muy simpatico.

Thanks for the Dorough article by Giddins. I've got both the Schoolhouse Rock box, and Dorough's early and 70s albums. Must pick up that pop art item, though.

The Larry King random thoughts post:

Thanks, David. Send me your address again. I finally got a copy of Thomas Berger's Who Is Teddy Villanova? for you. It's his detective fiction spoof. It ranks with Nick Danger in noir take offs. (Even though I just said it "spoof" isn't right nor is parody.) Brilliant use of language. The Ganymede misunderstanding, the Francophone jailbait, jokes arcane enough to make Pynchon blush... just a lot of fun.

She's free! At last! Uh... sorry. For a boy hitting puberty in the late 1970s Valerie Bertinelli was pretty much the pinnacle -- well, maybe along with Kim Richards, but that love entailed watching Hello Larry which was too much to ask -- and her marriage to EVH probably inspired more boys of my generation to pick up a guitar than EVH's shredding ever did. Anyway, she's free! Even if I'm not. And I only had to wait 25 years -- it's clearly meant to be! I love this part: "The couple... have one son, 14-year-old Wolfgang Van Halen." If I didn't already have such a rockin' pseudonym I would definitely be Wolfgang Van Halen. Maybe I'll do it anyway. How do I change my screen name?

Any news on the 33 and 1/3 pitches?

I vaguely remember the call for pitches but didn't give it much thought until being laid up. If I had it to do over again, and I weren't a lazy sack, I'd pick one of Sinatra's Nelson Riddle collaborations: In the Wee Small Hours, Songs for Swingin' Lovers, or Only the Lonely. The middle may be his best, the first has an amazing line up of songs and history on its side -- our very notion of an album can be traced back to it -- but I think I'd opt for Only the Lonely on the strength of Riddle's contributions. Extraordinary stuff. Here's the list of Tom Waits' favorite albums, topped by In the Wee Small Hours. And here's more on the Sinatra/Waits nexus. No, I don't think such a pitch would have had a snowball's chance in the Hellmouth of being selected, but just because others aren't historically minded doesn't mean I shouldn't be. I'll be standing in the corner w/ Tom singing "Dancing on the Ceiling". (Btw, I think I ended up as TW in the who are you quiz. Which was fine, but I took it with a grain of salt since as on almost every multiple choice thing I fill out 90% of the questions left me going, "I don't like any of these answers. I guess I'll go with this one, but I don't like it.")

How do I change my screen name?

Ask a stompy. If you're serious, I can do it in a moment. Etiquette requires that you indicate your previous name in your tagline, at least for a while.

Change it! Change it! You and I could form a virtual band that combines pyrotechnical guitar work with alienating guitar tunings and horribly morbid lyrics.

alienating guitar tunings and horribly morbid lyrics.

Speaking of, I keep meaning to download the Jandek covers off buffistarawk to bring to this.

Any news on the 33 and 1/3 pitches?

Nothing until the end of January.

Address is winging its way along the interpipe even now.

Speaking of, I keep meaning to download the Jandek covers off buffistarawk to bring to this.

I don't get the connection...

The 33 & 1/3 pitches and influential albums of the past 30 years led me to this interview with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee. Remember the VH1 Classic Albums documentaries where they'd interview the bands & producers & engineers (the Electric Ladyland one with Eddie Kramer and the one on the Band's second album were particularly good -- the Jew's harp sounding thing on "Up On Cripple Creek"? Garth Hudson's keyboard)? If I could pick one album for that series it would be It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back without a doubt. I hope that's one of the successful pitches, too, but I want to see and hear Chuck and Hank and Terminator X and Bill Stephney unpacking "Rebel Without a Pause" and Louder Than a Bomb" and everything else on that masterpiece. "We started with this James beat, and then put this on top of it. Then Vernon added some guitar. Then we added this and this and this and this and some of that and then a bit of this. Then Chuck and Flav did their parts. Then we added a bit more of this." It's pretty clear from the interview that that ain't gonna happen. The album might have made it under the copyright crackdown wire, and it may be grandfathered past the restrictions, but it's unlikely that they'd decide to kick the sleeping royalty dogs by naming every sample on that unbelievably dense recording. (Of course Chuck is kinda cranky so you never know.)

Edited for formatting.

For the Thirty Years of Influence question, with the caveat that I've been living in the past for years so know dick all about what's influenced the last ten or fifteen years worth of music, I'll throw out in no particular order:

1. Big Star, Radio City. Yeah, I know 1974 is more than thirty years ago, but barely. And this album is son of "only 1000 people bought it, but every one of them started a band.
2. Talking Heads, Remain in Light. This is slightly arbitrary as it's really an Eno pick more than a Talking Heads pick. I almost picked Another Green World. Coulda been one of his Bowie collaborations. Or another Heads production. Or The Joshua Tree. Eno's sonic fingerprints are all over.
3. Chic, Risque. Another slightly arbitrary pick. The Rodgers/Edwards production team was hugely influential, as was 'Nard's monster bass line for "Good Times," so I'll go with this album.
4. Prince, 1999. Picked because it was the real commercial breakthrough. I think he was already quite influential among musicians and producers (Janet Jackson might have had a career w/o Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis but it sure wouldn't have been the same one) but this really set him up for the takeover. Took a while to realize since Thriller was such a monster, but when the smoke cleared the decade blonged to the purple one, not the gloved one.
5. Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Chuck and Flav are great, but this is really the Bomb Squad's triumph. Too bad they lost the fight in "Caught, Can I Get a Witness". Check out Greg Tate's review in Flyboy in the Buttermilk if you can find a copy. Mine is in storage, & I don't know when I'll be back at work, otherwise I'd put it up at Buffistarawk.
6. Something by LaFace productions. You pick: Babyface, Boyz II Men, Toni Braxton, TLC. Smokey Robinson, part deux.
7. Nirvana, Nevermind. I don't know from indie cred, but it is a great album -- a bit frontloaded IMHO, but I blame that on CDs & the loss of album sides and programming -- and, once again, the commercial breakthrough matters. It's a popular artform and selling ten million copies matters, especially when the bulk of sales comes in a big explosion. (The Eagles' Greatest Hits may or may not have surpassed Thriller's sales, but there's NO comparison between the impact of the two.) It changed the pop equation in the early and mid nineties.
8. Garth Brooks. I don't know the name of any of his albums or any of his songs, but I remember when I worked for a music conference & we had a bunch of the trades lying around the house, and for big chunks of 1994 and 1995 he had multiple albums in the top 10, sometimes in the top 5. It was pretty mindblowing. I also remember looking at the top 5, which was something like Garth, Van Hagar, Ace of Base, Snoop, and Mariah Carey, and thinking, "Everyone of these is multi-platinum, huge hits, but could the audiences be any more fragmented? How much of Garth's audience was familiar with Van Halen or Snoop Dogg? How many Van Halen fans had heard "Loser" or "The Sign," the big Ace of Base hit? Was there ANYONE who owned Mariah's and Garth's CD?" Which is why I was harping on the importance of Nevermind's moment in the sun. Even if I'm kinda contrary and averse to crowds, metaphorical as well as literal, I see and understand the value of a pop moment.

And so ends my long-winded, only slightly better than ill-informed spiel.

ETA the part that got lost.