Overlooking none, hopin´ life gets better for the world

Time is truly wastin'

"Ernie was taken aback that Ron had uttered 'bullshit.' When asked why he said the word, Ron simply replied, 'because it needed to be said" and "it's what people want to hear.'"

Who is to say you'll be livin' in sadness

All I want to do is listen to Ernie Isley guitar solos and look at the sky and the leaves before they both go away, for the first harbinger of the Great Losses of autumn is my nasal and bronchial passages gone haywire.

They call it fall for a reason.

I just don't want this to go away. Please?

At least Ernie will stick around. I can even revisit the context of it all.

Random Play: Like an oasis in the sand

Oh, man, What a find on internet radio. The playlist on this joint continues to surprise me.

Take this, for instance. What pierced my work-directed attention--and, really, it pierced--is the fuzzed-out guitar.




I'm pierced--and struggling. Struggling to fully remember other fuzzed-out guitar sounds. Maybe?



No; it was fuzzy--but gloppier. A little wah-wah AND fuzz (as if I know what I am talking about). It's fuzz guitar, but in an R&B song, that this prog-rock (and eventually electronica; see below) guitarist's handiwork reminds me of.


There's this, of course:



But that's not it. No, there's another song with a slow-burning, fuzzy guitar lick, accompanied by sharp syllables gulped by back-up singers, and then...

Send help. Googling "fuzz guitar in R&B song" just sent me chasing that musical cottontail down his hole.

It's not Edwin Starr, or The Undisputed Truth, or The Temptations.

Perhaps I ought to just focus on what's at hand, rather than search frantically forward to try to reach what's way back.

And this guy, Steve Hillage? Brit, prog, summoned forth weird noises from a guitar in the 70s (including a track called "Glorious Om Riff") and weird noises from other artists in the 80s and weird noises from machines in the 90s and beyond.



For the unsatisfied seeker that this guy's earlier efforts sent tumbling across bytes and days (this post was started over a week ago), his second career output is soothing away the burning need to know. But not entirely.

In the end, I'd rather burn with curiosity spawned by the fuzz of electrical impulses snapping through wire and metal and wood and human hands than fade away on gentle, digitally-processed waves of sound.

So I shan't be concerned with the other side of the road

Thanks to Badu for this reminder.

Sometimes i just wanna bump The Isley Brothers, play a hand of spades and let the box fan blow my sins away. http://t.co/DQvZglIyQS
— ErykahBadoula (@fatbellybella) June 29, 2013

Heard In the Car: The chosen are few

I'm brimming with new features, but I've not had the focus to post them. While I was zipping to the grocery in a jet black car in the six o'clock darkness, a quiet storm broke in that musty Civic. I had to wait it out in the Whole Foods parking lot:



(I'm pretty sure I was the only person in that lot listening to this jam.)

Since I don't have a fancypants phone that I can simply wave aloft for it to name that tune, I had to, gawd, use Google to find it, listening til I found a unique-enough snippet of lyric to punch in.

The Isleys! In 2003! With R. Kelly! Shoulda know that bouncing bass groove was his (not to mention the tiny "hoos" throughout). That's what drew me into the song, actually. My head began to nod reflexively (another sole instance in the Whole Foods parking lot).

I'm gratified, actually, to learn that the Isleys continue to make contemporary music and that it's on commercial terrestrial radio. You can trace a line from "This Old Heart of Mine" (1966 -- and also prominent in a season two episode of Moonlighting in which David reunites with an old flame [nooooooo! Maddie!] played by Dana Delaney who [while the song is still playing waaaaay past its actual conclusion] confronts her pushy new boyfriend and happens to shoot and kill him [it was a detective show, remember?]) to "That Lady" (1972 -- one of my favorite funk songs ever, even when it was used to shill shampoo in the 90s) to "Between the Sheets" (1983 -- oh damn, that ding-dah-ding ding-ding transition is ...wow [and sampled everywhere now]).

I said I was not focused, didn't I?

All of these make me just want to simply drive at night, maybe give a tiny "hoo."