Great Muic and Hell

Music is purely subjective, its beauty lying in the ear of the beholder, and a lesser being would hesitate to suggest a playlist.

Not this blog!

Here are some wonderful songs, mostly stuff you haven't heard, and all can be yours from iTunes for less than $15. That, dear reader is a bargain.

1.) Pepper, Butthole Surfers. Their music is what you would expect, but this song is the exception that proves the rule, and is worth the entire $15.

2.) Trick of the Light, The Who. I like the Who more than I ever realized, and this one shows some angst you don't expect from Pete Townshend. It fucking rocks, start to finish, with powerful vocals by Roger Daltry. Daltry and David Byrne (Talking Heads) may be the best vocalists rock has produced.

3.) Little Red Book, Love. Almost 50 years old, and would be a re-release smash.

4.) The Killer in Me, Smashing Pumpkins. Why this is obscure beats the shit out of me.

5.) Talk Talk, The Music Machine. Another dusty record, this song influenced everything that followed.

6.) Watusi Rodeo, Guadalcanal Diary. Absolute fun.

7.) The Runner, Manfred Mann. If you are one, were one, or even know one well, this song is all over the nerve.

8.) Second Skin, The Gits. Find it, play it, love it. The good die young, and Mia Zapata was just getting started.

9.) The Passenger, Siouxsie & the Banshees. Great band, great vocals, limited audience. Do yourself a favor and change that last.

10.) Maybe, Collective Soul. For me this song is inextricably linked with Krystal Gingerich. Listen, and you'll know who it was meant for.

And two live cuts. I have seen one movie adaptation that I felt did justice to the book - Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. The book is one of my very favorites, and Gregory Peck's Atticus Finch made me wish he were my father. Okay, that might not be fair to my father, and were he around for my 8th or any subsequent birthday, I might reevaluate.

I mostly prefer album cuts to live records. If you've spent any time with the Grateful Dead, you know every live track of the same song is completely different, and such personalized music doesn't appeal to me, unless, of course, I was there.

That said, these last two songs are so much better in live versions that it really is striking.

1.) See Me, Feel Me, The Who, from the Woodstock album. I have always felt this is the best song of the show, and worth the price of the 2-record set, even used, even scratched. If you were there, and you weren't, and you stayed after this song, you wasted part of your life. Remember, this was from the first rock opera, and Woodstock was in 1968.

2.) Blood Makes Noise, Suzanne Vega. On the album this is a nice song. The live song is murder rock, and you'll wonder why you never paid her more aural attention.

Then go and listen to the album cut and that question is answered.

If I get any feedback, I'll trot out a few more for your inspection.

A red tail flew from a tree in a roadside woods and outpaced me for about forty yards, then banked back into the woods. My initial thought was I hadn't seen one in the area before, and it occurred I was thinking like a human. A red tail's range is defined not by miles but by available food. Several miles' flight is effortless, and burns up far fewer field mice than the dead dinosaur juice you use to move your 3000 pounds of plastic the same distance.

So then the big boy was familiar, with numerous sightings in an area unbounded by the sky.

There was a saying popular years ago - "hotter than the hinges of hell" - which certainly described today. "Hinges" suggest a door or a gate, and one should consider if it keeps people in or out. If "heaven" is eternity in the presence of a god that lets children starve to death, that allows rape and debasement of women believers, allows Mia Zapata to die on the streets of Seattle at the hands of a crazed Cuban boatlifter from Florida, that visits natural disasters on the very poorest, like Haiti, that follows up a devastating hurricane with an oil slick likely to denude Gulf coastal waters, then I think I'll need to stand in line to get into hell.