Gris-Gris.

WFMU is raising money towards the rebuilding of WWOZ [link]

Arrrgh. I am earwormed with "Meet De Boys On De Battlefront". Which is a great song, but...

Which, geographically, would be the Riverbend section of New Orleans over by Tulane.

Okay, so what's the second Dr. John album I buy after loving "Dr. John's Gumbo"?

As Corwood notes, Gris Gris is one of the good doctor's best albums. I will note, however, that it is a big slab of dark voodoo funk, and not the New Orleans history lesson you get in Gumbo.

You might like All By Hisself: Live At the Lonestar. AMG says:

This is a stone-solo piano outing recorded over two nights in 1986 at New York's premier roots music nightspot. The sound is phenomenal, the material is stellar — "Stagger Lee," "Swanee River Boogie," "Such a Night," "Junco Partner," "Iko, Iko," "Right Place, Wrong Time," and many others — and the performance is off the hook. Easily one of the best Dr. John live recordings, it sets a standard for capturing solo performers live and in the raw. In addition to one hour-plus CD, there is a bonus DVD included in the package. It's an intimate video of Rebennack sitting and playing music, talking about music, New Orleans, and the lineage of the great piano players from the Crescent City by a man whose entire life has been informed by that tradition. It's a one-of-a-kind portrait that is worth the price all by itself. This is the Christmas present for roots music fans in 2003.

I don't own it, but I'm very tempted by his Duke Ellington tribute, Duke Elegant:

Duke Elegant certainly wasn't the only tribute to Duke Ellington put out in honor of the 100th anniversary of the legendary bandleader, nor was it even the first time Dr. John had tackled his material. But it would be hard to find a better homage than this one. Dr. John proves a surprisingly good match for Ellington's material, placing a tremendously funky foundation under the composer's tunes. The sound is dominated by the good doctor's incomparable New Orleans piano and organ, naturally, and the best tracks are those whose melodies are carried solely by his keyboard work, such as instrumentals "Caravan" and "Things Ain't What They Used to Be." The vocal cuts are fine — his takes on the Ellington ballad "Solitude" and especially the dreamy, elegant "Mood Indigo" show off Dr. John's uniquely expressive voice as well as any of his early-era recordings — though he occasionally tends to approach self-caricature, as on "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)." Any weakness, however, is more than made up for by the closing rearrangement of "Flaming Sword," one of three Ellington rarities here. Dr. John transforms the instrumental into a luminous, gorgeously melodic display of Professor Longhair-style piano over an astonishingly sexy New Orleans funk rhythm. Ultimately, Duke Elegant holds up both as an innovative twist on the Ellington songbook and as a solid Dr. John album in its own right.

There's this meme going around where you look through the Billboard Top 100 the year you graduated from high school and mark which songs would not make you change the station automatically.

I graduated in 1990. And this is all I came up with:

9. Cradle Of Love, Billy Idol

21. All Around The World, Lisa Stansfield

41. Roam, B-52's

52. Praying For Time, George Michael

63. The Humpty Dance, Digital Underground

65. Free Fallin', Tom Petty

67. Enjoy The Silence, Depeche Mode

78. Love Shack, B-52's

81. Everybody Everybody, Black Box

94. Just A Friend, Biz Markie

10 of 100, although almost all of them I wouldn't change because of the novelty of hearing them on the radio. I don't see any "classics" on here. Maybe Enjoy The Silence, which is what This Corrosion would have sounded like without Steinman.

I'm shocked that I came up with 10, honestly. 1990 was a low point in pop music.

My senior year of high school I was listening to U2, REM, New Order, and Zeppelin. Local radio in Tulsa sucked, save our lightbulb-powered alternative station that played Pretty Hate Machine and Floodland as if the CDs were glued in the machine.

I also graduated high school in 1990, but I'm not nearly as tolerant as you, dw. In fact, not only would I change the channel if one of those came on the radio, I might be inclined to rip the radio out of the car and throw it out of the window, or, at the very least, make a mental note to ask my wife to turn the station back to NPR when she borrows my car.

Heh. We're down to three radio stations we listen to in the car: KUOW (NPR), KOMO (for M's games), and glorious KEXP. And with that rotation, I haven't listened to Clearchannel/Entercom crap in years. If it's music, it's CD mixes or it's streaming through my iPod via the radio transmitter I have for it.

In fact, I don't understand why I need eighteen station presets on the car radio or even bother to let the radio pre-set them for me.

(very grateful we finally got a funk station in Phoenix) Because while I was on a demonstration in DC(no, duh, right?) I fell in love with one. All because the radio got "stuck" on...probably from my reading...WOOK. Nobody could work it, but they also didn't appreciate, either. One roommate liked country and not so much melanin in her grooves(and was vehement enough that our friendship kind of didn't survive the high-stakes game of "You May Be a Redneck...) And the other was a flowing-skirt granola who liked...chants and such. So I was like "They don't make 'em like that anymore..." and they were like "?!"

Songs from my year that I would still listen to if they popped up:

(N.B.: I have very little confidence that any of these don't actually suck; this may in fact just be a list of the only songs from the entire list that I actually recognize, but for some reason each of these pinged a faint Oh, yeah, I kinda liked that not-quite-memory)

(Okay, no, that's not quite true. I recognize all the Madonna songs on my year's list. I just hate them.)

Kyrie, Mr. Mister
West End Girls, Pet Shop Boys
Sledgehammer, Peter Gabriel
These Dreams, Heart
What Have You Done For Me Lately, Janet Jackson
Manic Monday, Bangles
Walk Of Life, Dire Straits
The Sweetest Taboo, Sade
Nasty, Janet Jackson
R.O.C.K. In The U.S.A., John Cougar Mellencamp
Small Town, John Cougar Mellencamp
Life In A Northern Town, Dream Academy
Walk This Way, Run-D.M.C.

Corwood sez:

I'm not nearly as tolerant as you, dw. In fact, not only would I change the channel if one of those came on the radio, I might be inclined to rip the radio out of the car and throw it out of the window

Even The Humpty Dance?

::cries::

Also, I'm beyond appalled to find that I'm four years older than Corwood. I always felt okay with my sense of overwhelming intellectual minusculosity in his presence because I somehow had it in my head that Corwood was a hard-living musically omnivorous professor of everything a handful of years older than Hec. Now? I'm still a dwarf, and Corwood's the same age as my baby brother.

::cries again::

I'm shocked as well, but still younger than all y'all. Also,YAY...the lovely mix got here. I will thank you properly, all old-school and stuff, but just wanted to extend the props.

Yay! I had such fun doing the covers, though I think Hec had rather more fun working on the actual mixes.