vinyl

Dad’s Top 10 Favorite New LPs of 2018

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

December 20, 2018

Does the music of 2018 sound any different than the music of 2008? I’m just asking. The top three albums of ’08 were Lil Wayne’s The Carter III, Coldplay’s Viva la Vida, and Taylor Swift’s Fearless. The music of 1978 (Best selling LP: soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever) was light years from records of 1968 (Top seller: Are You Experienced? by the Jimi Hendrix Experience). Is new music new in any way? I mean there’s good stuff but it seems like we’re in a stylistic holding pattern. Maybe I’m just getting old and don’t know where to look. Other than Greta Van Fleet (who sound more 1968 than 2018), there wasn’t any new music that I went apeshit over.

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This was a great year to pick up vinyl but my long-standing tradition of weekly record shopping went right out the window as the finances tightened.  The high point was buying vinyl all over the world, including New York, London, Leeds, Oslo, Chicago, Washington DC, and even Abu Dhabi. All of it ended up on Andrea and my new YouTube channel, Vinyl Fetish. The channel gave us a great opportunity to talk about our favorite records, often after a night out on the town. There was more vinyl consumed than CDs this year, but most of it was old jazz sides.

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We also really dialed back the live shows. There was a point in my life when I saw live music six nights a week. (The seventh night was cheap beer night at the Stein Club in Atlanta.) Between the traveling, the budget, and the fact that our babysitter went and had a baby of her own, there weren’t too many nights rocking out. But some of the highlights were seeing Mexican greats Café Tacuba in Portland and jazz legend McCoy Tyner at Blue Note in Greenwich Village. We saw the great Bowie tribute band, Bowievision, twice. One of my most blissed-out moments was seeing the classic ska band, The Dekkertones, in a London pub full of skinheads. Yes, I skanked.

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Regardless of all the new music I missed in 2018, the top two are albums I played to absolute death. The first was the “new” John Coltrane album, Both Directions at Once. The tracks were unreleased gems from 1963 that were found on a shelf somewhere and turned into an album by his son Ravi. The pure thrill of  hearing a new Coltrane album full of brilliant improvisation by his greatest quartet (including McCoy Tyner) was beyond measure. The packaging on Trane’s old Impulse! label was top notch. And my video review did pretty well, too!

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The other was Paul McCartney’s Egypt Station. I’ve bought each new McCartney album on the day of its release since Wings’ London Town (Friday, March 31, 1978). Some have been brilliant. Paul at age 76 is still brilliant. Like all his albums, I was unsure at first listen but it just grew and grew on me and I’m still not tired of playing it. His epic tune “Despite Repeated Warnings” (in the vein of “Band of the Run”) is the perfect take-down of Trump (“Take away the keys and lock him up”) and an affirmation of the will of the people (“Yes, we can do it!”). When most geezers are making peace with their maker, Paul is firing on all cylinders, creating an album were each song is chocked full of insight and tasty treats. I just wish he didn’t feel the need to take the act on the road again with the same old band and a voice that is no longer built for three-hour concerts. You’re good, Paulie. The studio is your domain. Show the kids how it’s done.

So I didn’t have enough this year for a Top 20, but here are ten albums I absolutely loved this year.

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  1. Paul McCartney – Egypt Station
  2. John Coltrane – Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album
  3. Paul Weller – True Meanings
  4. Kacey Musgraves – Golden Hour
  5. Greta Van Fleet – Anthem of the Peaceful Army
  6. Janelle Monae – Dirty Computer
  7. Bruebeck Brothers Quartet – Timeline
  8. Pistol Annies – Interstate Gospel
  9. Darling Machines – Darling Machines
  10. Father John Misty – God’s Favorite Customer

And it’s next on my “To Buy” list so I fully anticipate that Elvis Costello’s Look Now belongs on that list somewhere. Here’s to a better income in 2019 and the joy of purchasing more new music. And to something interesting happening.

 

 

 

 

The Vinyl Fetish Club is here for your sexy music needs.

~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

February 14, 2018

YouTube was founded on Valentines Day 2005. I remember the first time I logged on thirteen years ago in my office at Portland State. A grad student told me I could find some vintage Pink Floyd performances on this new platform. One search, and I was off into the clickstream of random short clips (with not an ad in sight!). Everything imaginable was suddenly just a button away, from old movie trailers to speeches by Serbian nationalists.

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I started my own channel in 2009 to “vlog” a cross-country trip, from Portland to Atlanta and back to Portland, that stopped at numerous famous crime scenes. It was a downer travelouge but highly educational. The clip I recorded in Jasper, Texas, sight of the 1998 dragging death of of James Byrd, Jr., has nearly 20,000 views. More recently the channel has turned into a place to chronicle Cozy’s evolution and all around cuteness. I’ve never seen a penny from any of these videos. It’s just been a place to share.

As Andrea and I were scratching our heads about how to get through this period of diminished income, she mentioned that millennials are turning YouTube into a revenue generator. There are a ton of channels that I don’t quite understand making bank on monetizing viewership. The top ranked channel is tseries, which shows Bollywood music and movie clips from India. With over 31 billion views, it generates close to $100,000 a day. A day. Channels dedicated to toy reviews have billions of plays. Billions.

This week Andrea and I join their ranks. We thought it would be fun to film us doing what we do best (OK, second best), talking about music. We have a lot of great cross-generational, Gen X to Millennial, chats about records. I love sharing my “ancient” twentieth century music with someone born after the creation of MTV and she shares some amazing discs from south of the border.  She was born in southern Mexico and I grew up in the suburban South. We both value the totality of a great record. I gave her Patti Smith and she gave me Café Tacvba.

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We’re happy to launch the Vinyl Fetish Club on YouTube, where we wander into my record collection and I play some choice platters for my beloved wife. There will be some great sociological discussions, but I have a feeling the best part will be charting her reactions as I lay some Dead Kennedys and King Crimson on her orejas. Viewers might enjoy that sight more than me explaining why a guy from Fugazi producing a Bikini Kill record matters. She’s a lot to take in when a good tune is blasting out of the crappy Service Merchandise stereo in my record room. Hot blooded, check it and see.

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Our first episode is dedicated to the ever controversial Ted Nugent and his 1977 classic album Cat Scratch Fever. We ask the question, can shitty people make great art? Nugent is among the shittiest, but that is still a great album. And before you get all high and mighty liberal, most of the music you love was made by seriously flawed people. John Lennon admitted that he beat his first wife, so does that put The Beatles off limits? So we start with a challenging call to love the jam while rejecting the man.

Please subscribe. We plan to upload a video each week and there will certainly be diversions from our “record review” theme. I don’t expect to have as many subscribers as JustinBieberVevo (16,941,467,020), but I can promise it will be highly entertaining.  And fledgling hipsters can pick up some inside info impress their lame peers. And also, Andrea. Happy birthday, YouTube.

Father Randy’s Top 20 LPs for 2016: Back to Vinyl

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

December 27, 2016

Near the end of my tenure at Portland State University, the provost instituted her “challenge,” called reTHINK PSU, designed to encourage the growth of the use of technology to expand the university . She invited a speaker to get the faculty onboard the move to online education. He repeated the Nathan Harden line, that in fifty years half the brick and mortar colleges and universities in the country would be history, replaced by websites (probably run by some kid in India). The message was get on the train or get left at the station. He tried to make the point by claiming that CD technology had replaced vinyl records, so get ready for college professors to go the way of the Foghat album.

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Ironically I was listening to this talk sitting in my office in Cramer Hall as it streamed on the university server. If I had been in the room, I would have jumped up to say that CDs sales were tanking, but vinyl was making a massive comeback, growing even faster than downloads and streaming music. Fortune magazine reported in April that vinyl album sales were at a 28-year high. Turns our kids want their Taylor Swift on wax (and their teachers in the goddamn classroom). Sometimes the old way is the best.

I say this because I really fell off my hipness high horse this year. The arrival of the baby in 2014 got me out of the cavalcade of live shows and endless hours in record stores. In 2016, between a rampaging toddler, the effort to return to work, busting Trump’s tiny balls, and finishing my new novel, The Dream Police, I just abdicated my staples for side-lined music aficionadodom. My favorite podcasts,  All Songs Considered, Sound Opinions, and Alt Latino, went un-downloaded. Our local weeklies, Willamette Week and The Portland Mercury, remained in their boxes on NE Alberta Street. An occasional breeze or hip kid would blow in to let me know what was up, but I missed so much. Did you know that Radiohead put out an awesome album in 2016? Of course you did.

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Where I kept things real was on the vinyl front. A large chunk of the new releases I bought this year were on vinyl (including a bootleg vinyl release of Frank Ocean’s long-awaited follow up to the brilliant 2012 release, Orange). I couldn’t stop buying vinyl, at Amoeba Music in LA and Peaches in New Orleans, and a dozen record stores in Portland. Old, new, kids’ records, 45’s, and even Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass from the 50 cent bin at Everyday Music. Solange just sounded better on vinyl and Bowie had to be experienced deep in the ruts. The ghost is the grooves, not the machine.

Andrea and I took our love of LPs into the sharing economy. Our basement just became an AirBNB called the Alberta Vinyl Den. Each guest lets me know his or her music tastes when they make a booking and I stock the room with a dozen albums from my massive collection. So guests get to feel like they are staying in the record store of their dreams, complete with a turntable and a refrigerator full of beer.

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2016 was a still a great year for music. With the blessing of babysitters we did manage to see some great shows, including some true classics; Patti Smith, Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, Bruce Springsteen, and the Electric Light Orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl (a double bucket list item). We saw some good world music, like Bomba Estereo and Bombino. We saw a wildly drunken gig by Greasy Alice in New Orleans and caught a show by old friend Chris Robinson that took us down a rabbit hole. I just caught Georgia underground pioneers Pylon at Mississippi Studios. (Last time I saw them was at the Agora Ballroom in 1983.) Earlier in the year we caught a barely attended show there by Sir Paul’s son, James McCartney and got to chat after the gig. Other than the Cuban band we saw every Sunday during our summer on Isla Mujeres, I think my favorite show of 2016 was Father John Misty at Edgefield in the pouring rain surrounded by a thousand other dudes with beards. It was perfectly Portland.

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So here is my Top 20 favorite albums of 2016, recognizing that I’m surely missing a ton I will discover in 2017 or 2027. (Nick Cave’s new one? Someone said it was killer.) I really think we’ll be talking about the Beyoncé and Solange albums 50 years from now.  A serious thanks to the gang at Music Millennium for pointing me in the right direction on some good stuff.

  1. David Bowie – Blackstar
  2. Beyoncé – Lemonade
  3. Y La Bamba – Ojos del Sol
  4. Solange – A Seat at the Table
  5. Drive-By-Truckers – American Band
  6. Miranda Lambert – The Weight of These Wings
  7. Michael Kiwanuka – Love & Hate
  8. Frank Ocean – blond
  9. Rolling Stones – Blue & Lonesome
  10. Bombino – Azel
  11. Patti Smith – Horses: Live at Electric Ladyland Studios
  12. The Beatles – Live at Hollywood Bowl
  13. Bob Dylan – Fallen Angels
  14. Carla Morrison – Amor Supremo
  15. The Bangles – Ladies and Gentlemen…
  16. A Tribe Called Quest  – We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service
  17. Sturgill Simpson – A Sailor’s Guide To Earth
  18. Chris Robley – The Great Make Believe
  19. Ages and Ages – Something to Ruin
  20. Cheap Trick – Bang, Zoom, Crazy… Hello

Here’s to more music on vinyl in 2017. And more professors in classrooms.