Random Play: Someone's just outside, knocking at my door

This is what I like to call men's Seventies v-neck shirt music. To wit.

Jazz guitarist, uncredited sitter-in with Pink Floyd and purveyor of the Synthaxe, Lee Ritenour seems to be seems to be fairly reviled in most music quarters. Guessing from the sounds I'm sampling, this "true fusionist" probably laid the a lot of the sonic foundation for early Smooth Jazz radio.

I remember this track from the time it charted--probably from MTV, which apparently played this video on Day One. That's right, this guy was on MTV.

I dig this track because it sounds like taking a boat to Sausalito while drinking white wine in the late Seventies; or, rather, it sounds like Toto.

Also, his other album titles--Lee Ritenour's Gentle Thoughts and Captain Fingers, made me giggle.


Lee Ritenour - Is It You by PeteRock

Got no mass appeal.

Post by The Replacements.

There's no problem, only solutions

Imagining peace. Being still and watching may be the first step.

Random Play: I've been doing some whining, now I'm doing some finding

Oh, what a delicate little gemstone the radio gave me today. Fluffy flakes fell outside my window, and these big, fluffy strings trilled and swooped. It's a composition by Denny Laine, formerly of The Moody Blues and futurely of Wings (with Paul McCartney), sung by Colin Blunstone, who also made "She's Not There" smooth as buttah for The Zombies. And Colin was clearly the teen lust receptacle for The Zombies, as this appearance on Hullabaloo shows.

I mean, I was shredding my voice and my wallet over some British boys with dramatic cheekbones and kissable lips (albeit covered in gloss) only two decades later.

Colin's still had a bit of the palpitation-causing intensity when he went solo in '72. At least I think so, today, in this tight room under a gray sky, hearing this precisely-cut voice.

And everything will be cool.

Random Play: Never thought I'd fall again so easily

Some schmaltz from 1980 arises as soon as I turn on the radio this morning--and its long-forgotten provenance that I must've osmosed as a child who turned on the radio some morning then.



THEN you play "Starship Troopers" for me, Zenith? Sister Bluebird, look what you've done to me.

Revved up like a deuce

Finishing the first coffee I've had in a week...

Random Play: Running over the same old ground

How do you make things new, every day, when days mimic each other, and especially when heading into the perpetually gray or low-light days?

Routines and not-routines. Finding the novel and embedding it in the regular, by seeing. And listening. And doing that again.

Is that growing?

At the very least it's (like) discovering something (new) on the radio.


Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here by larsen42

It's getting to be what I like to call Pink Floyd weather. It has to be something about all the fading light that--you know what?--makes each day different. Huh.

Perhaps I should kick off the season with something new.

You must be feeling what I'm feeling, too

Praise to satellite radio, which has been turning up some gems, particularly from the Studio 54 Radio and The Groove channels. There are definitely humans behind the programming, or at least I'd like to think so. Oh, no, they're not content with throwing some EWF and "Bad Mama Jama" and Thelma Houston with you. These cats dig deep. For instance:



Who are Brother To Brother? The Interwebs coughs up barely anything; they plied their trade mainly on dancefloors, and in the funky year of our flares 1976, they released an album (their second) that fit into but didn't spring out of the landscape. That year alone gave us this, and this, and, all bow down now, this.

BTB now reside with the other out-of-print  undead, lovingly preserved in (some) record store bins. And in drips and drops on Youtube. Mildly appreciated and now forgotten by all except the crate diggers and the platter spinners and those who research and celebrate.

Random Play: We'll go collecting the days

It's a new season, and time for a new feature. Just like old-school network teevee blithely rolling out comedy pilots chock-full of the forced laughter of tourist audiences--well, this won't be like that.

It's time to exploit my comfortable classic-rock radio listening, the Mr. Rodgers sweater I snuggle into as I work the work-job or continue to unpack the Matterhorn of boxes in my new home. I found a new station last month that has a diversity and homogeneity, all at once, that makes this task a breeze. It's Ireland-based, though most of the bumpers are, inexplicably, voiced in fake American accents. But you sense the source is over there since the station name is pronounced "ZEH-nith Classic Rock."

I'll pick something the radio plays, and treat it well.

(But it is all still a ploy to force me into writing consistently)

This track struck me at first today because I thought it was Carole King's "Jazzman." Then I heard that familiar 70s-radio brogue. "Year of the Cat" and "Time Passages" are two of drop-everything, turn-up-the-radio favorites, so it's no wonder I like this less familiar Al Stewart mellow journey, with its "How Long (Has This Been Going On)" bass line. Then there is the story of a man's sweet, persistent convincing of his love to his love.

Al spins a good yarn, subtly and gently; but in his younger years, when he basically knew or worked with everybody (Yoko to Andy Summers to Jimmy Page) who was anybody, his storytelling was less proportioned. To wit: the 18-minute title track from his second (1969) album, aptly named Love Chronicles, that details his first falling-in-loves and intimate escapades, replete with assignations in English gardens and bemoaning of "the bridge of impotence."

I think this track, though, is more my speed, for its radio length, even though it has the same happy-to-be-oversharing spirit--and is filtered through the cool composure of Alan Parsons.

Story rock managed by prog rock. Now that's true love.