Etta James

#1076: Weekend Listening At Home

RECORD STORE TALES #1076: Weekend Listening At Home

When I have time and the inclination at home, I like to go through dusty corners of the CD collection and finally get them ripped to PC.  I take my hard drives with me everywhere, so my music collection is always portable.  This weekend I took some deep dives, and sampled the sweet exotic fruits of the E section, a sampling of K’s and L’s, and some new arrivals too.

First of all, the newer stuff.

I’m going to have to re-review Morning Report by the Arkells again!  Turns out, I made a mistake in my original review.  I said that the deluxe edition had three bonus tracks, but I was wrong.  I didn’t realize that there was another bonus track inserted as track #2, between “Drake’s Dad” and “Private School”.  This makes all the difference in the world to the sequencing.  Now we get “Knocking At The Door”, a new single, as the new track #2.  Since “Drake’s Dad” and “Private School” were my two least favourite songs, having something of much higher quality between them really helps the flow.

I always buy something after doing a show on Grant’s Rock Warehouse.  This time, it was the Stone Gods.  I’ve acquired the single for “Burn the Witch”, which comes with two awesome non-album songs:  “Breakdown”, and “Heartburn”!  “Breakdown” is exactly like Thin Lizzy, to a tee, except with Richie Edwards on lead vocals.  “Breakdown” is of equally high quality, a light and humorous tune about Pepto-Bismol and Gaviscon.  Expect a review at some point in the future.

Finally, I sampled some April Wine, from Over 60 Minutes With…All the Rockers.  People ask me “Why do you not own any April Wine?”  I said “I never grew up with April Wine, my friends didn’t like them, so I never bothered.”  Well Tim Durling said I need April Wine.  I will evaluate this at a later date, but I have some April Wine now.

The next batch of discs was from the last part of the E section, five discs that had escaped ripping to the PC all these years.  It could be 20 years or more since I have last played some of these.   Earth, Wind & Fire, nothing need be said here, that’s essential.  I was surprised at the quality of Elf, as boogie-woogie isn’t usually my thing.  The Rik Emmett CD is cool because it has 2001 live versions of some of his old Triumph classics.  Episode Six runs the gamut from quaint to psychedelic.  “UFO” is one cool such song, a spoken word bit over drums, that reads from UFO sighting reports.  But that’s Ian Gillan and Roger Glover on the front cover, yes indeed!  Finally, the Eric Singer Project (ESP) was the weak link in this batch.  Just a bland covers album to me.

Next, over to the K section.  I noticed that none of my Kula Shaker music was on PC, and I have a lot of Kula Shaker.  That’s the entire collection below, in fact.

Look!  The 2 CD edition of debut album K with a cool remix of “Tattva”.  Two CDs of “Govinda” singles with B-sides and remixes.  “Grateful When You’re Dead/Jerry Was There” CD single with two non-album tracks. The highlight of me of these was “The Leek”, a quiz show style radio appearance by bassist Alonza Bevan.  (A distant cousin of Roger Glover, in fact.)  Really funny stuff.  To me, anyway!  Two CDs of “Hush”, the Joe South cover (also covered by Deep Purple Mk I) with lots more non-album tracks.  Then we have the Summer Sun EP, which has four of the previous B-sides and two songs I didn’t have elsewhere.  The second album, Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts spawned a CD single called “Sound of Drums”, both of which are here.  More non-album tracks on that as well.

Well, it turns out, I still love Kula Shaker!  Like, a lot.  That Britpop sound, mixed with 60s psychedelia and far Eastern influences just tickles my fancy.  There were a couple tracks I really loved, but none more than “108 Battles of the Mind” from the second album.  What a cool, manic track that definitely benefited from the Austin Powers era.

One thing about Kula Shaker that needs to be addressed:  the stellar musicianship.  These guys can jam!  Special notice to drummer Paul Winterhart who is absolute monster.  Incredible band.  Once I start re-absorbing these songs back into my memory, I may have to catch up with what they’ve been up to since 1999, where my collection ends.

Continuing through K, and into L, the listening continued on Sunday morning.

Kyuss is a band that I don’t think was summed up well by compilation.  I will have to dig further.  I have their split EP with Queens of the Stone Age, which has “Fatso Forgotso” on it, but I think Kyuss were an album band.  The two Kulick albums are excellent.  Corabi is on Transformer, which is signed!  I didn’t know I had a signed copy!  The James LaBrie solo disc also sounds great from what I sampled!  Very Dream Theater, in a good way.  Some heavy, some soft.  Then we have Life Sex & Death, also called LSD.  Their gimmick was their lead singer “Stanley” who was supposedly homeless (but wasn’t).  This 1992 album is one that needs more exploration.  What I heard was heavy, gritty and riffy while retaining some melody.  To be further examined in the future.

As far as I got on the weekend, this just scratches the surface.  Look at all this stuff that is still sealed in my collection.  Time or inclination just haven’t lined up with the proper mood yet.  Some are newer arrivals, like Metheny, Hollywood Vampires and Eric Carr.  Others have been sitting around for years.  The Kiss compilation may as well stay sealed for collector’s purposes, but The Boxed Life by Rollins…that could have been waiting a decade on these shelves.  The Garth Hudsons have been here since 2020.  The Etta James and Beatles since 2018.  They were in Jen’s mom’s collection.

Wish me luck as I continue to delve into these unheard corners of my collection.  What would you be playing first if you stumbled onto these discs?

 

#725: “Mum’s” Music

GETTING MORE TALE #725: “Mum’s” Music

We couldn’t keep everything from “Mum’s” house.  Jen’s mother amassed a huge amount of possessions over the years.  We had to choose what to keep and what to leave behind.  Like most people, she had a lot of old worthless albums and CDs.  She also had a couple good ones, some of which baffled me.  I know I gave her the Rush CD, but I don’t know where some of these others came from!  Many are still sealed with price tags affixed.

I know I’m bad for that too.  I have many CDs that have been here for years, still sealed.  My collection is several thousand albums deep now.  There is a lot of stuff I just haven’t gotten around to hearing yet.  I guess “Mum” was the same.  I never really saw her listening to music at home although I know she loved certain artists and songs.  I don’t think she even had a working CD player anymore.  Jen says they mostly listened to music in the car.

Because she was so supportive, she owned two CDs by my sister Kathryn.  Her solo album Open is ironically still sealed.  Mum would have bought that at the CD release show, back in 2010 at the Button Factory in Waterloo.  (I was supposed to perform our song “Evil Kirk” that night but I was suffering from a throat infection so it was impossible for me to do.)  Mum loved watching Kathryn perform even if the music was beyond her.  She also had a copy of my sister’s first CD, A Recital of Works for Bass Clarinet.  I brought these back home with me.  Maybe I’ll do a contest to give them away.

Some decent greatest hits discs were found.  I think Mum would be glad that we kept some of her jazz classics.  I needed some Louis Armstrong, and now I have All Time Greatest Hits (1994) with 18 songs.  She also loved Etta James; she danced with Jen’s dad to “At Last” at our wedding.  Etta James was one of her favourites.  I’m going to do my best to appreciate her music.  Etta James’ Her Best (1997, 20 tracks) is still sealed but I’ll crack it open and give it a shot.

The Beach Boys’ Sounds of Summer also looks like a good one.  It’s 30 songs and I know virtually all of them.  Jen is a huge Beach Boys fan and I think this greatest hits is better than any she had before.  We will get lots of play from this, I know.  Then there’s Experience Hendrix: The Best of Jimi Hendrix!  This one is opened!  I never heard her mention Jimi Hendrix, not once.  We have no idea what she was doing with Jimi in her collection.  I already have lots of Jimi, but this one has a really nice booklet with liner notes.

Two sealed Beatles CDs were in the collection.  Jen and I are the bigger Beatles fans, but we didn’t own Live at the BBC Volume 1 or 2!  These are the 2013 remasters, too.  I’ll admit I’ve never liked the first Live at the BBC.  It came out during my first Christmas at the Record Store, and it stiffed.  We sat on a huge pile of them that we couldn’t sell.  Nobody wanted rough live versions of Beatles songs.  People wanted the hits, and BBC disappointed many when it appeared under the Christmas tree in 1994.  (The same thing happened with Anthology 1 in 1995.)  Now we have both BBC sets, so we’ll have to give them another chance.  She also had Abbey Road on LP, which isn’t in terrible shape.  It’s my favourite Beatles album and it will be cool to hear it on vinyl, the way it was intended.

Also among the LPs was a Beach Boys double hits LP called Summer Dreams.  I was excited to find one by Gordon Lightfoot called 2 Originals of Gordon Lightfoot.  This contains two of his complete albums, Don Quixote and Summer Side of Life.  I owned neither until now.  Some of the coolest records were the soundtracks.  We took Rocky, Chariots of Fire, and The Buddy Holly Story.  The cool thing about The Buddy Holly Story is that the cast are the actual singers and musicians.  So that means it’s Gary Busey singing and playing lead guitar.  And he’s great!  This is a classic soundtrack that I am glad to finally own.

As discussed in a previous chapter, for some reason when Mum was sick, I felt a strong connection to Cat Stevens.  Specifically it was the song “If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out”.  When we were watching over her in her last days, that song came into my head and I don’t know why.  I felt like she was trying to tell me something.  She never wanted either of us to be sad.  In my mind, it seemed like Mum was telling me not to be sad.  “Well, if you want to sing out, sing out.  And if you want to be free, be free.  ‘Cause there’s a million things to be, you know that there are.”  It seemed like something she would have said.  So when she finally passed, and we started going through her things, I found a Cat Stevens CD with that exact song on it.  It’s not on the 1975, 1990, or 2000 greatest hits albums.  But it is on Icon.  There it was, still sealed, and it had the song.  How strange, I thought, as a tear went down my face.

The world is strange indeed; or as Cat said it’s a “Wild World”.  There are coincidences that seem connected even if they are not.  The human brain has a knack for finding patterns, and many of us mistake this for deeper meaning.  Even though it could be pure chance, I think Mum was speaking to me when that song came into my head.  It’s a comforting thought.  I’ll take it.

When I write these stories about her, I miss her even more.  I can’t do it without crying at least once.  But it’s important to me that you get to know her a little bit.  She was an amazing woman, and this is just a small part of the music that she loved.