[Rant, Music] Sound in Your Skull

Earbuds, how hard should they be? Earbuds are one of those things that I have spent too much time dealing with and trying to get right.  I use earbuds for two things mainly; at the gym up north and walking the dog down south. At the gym I just need standard earbuds, as long as they fit well.  I don't need noise cancellation although it's nice.  Down south I need almost the opposite, essentially I want something open air so I can hear traffic coming and be aware of my surroundings.

Up north I had until recently been using Jabra Elites.  They were fine.  Good sounding workhorses.  I usually charged the case before each session, but even if I didn't I could usually get as much as four hours out of them.  Of late, though they had gotten flaky -- occasionally telling me the battery was low when I had just changed them or, more recently, only one of the two earbuds functioning.  My experience with relatively inexpensive hardware is that once it starts to flake, the end is near, no point in trying to save them.

So I began looking at reviews.  First off, Amazon reviews are notoriously inaccurate and often outright fraudulent.  I have purchased at least one product that included a coupon that promised a $50 amazon gift card to me if I posted a five star review and sent them documentation of doing so.  That 4.7 rating, even if there are thousands of reviews, is suspect.  Secondly, you have to be careful about professional looking review sites, as often as not they are bought and sold, giving good reviews to anyone who will send them free stuff to review, even if the thing sucks.

After a good bit of exploration I came to the conclusion that Anker Soundcore A are the consensus best value.  I took a shot, and they do sound very, very good. Time will tell if they hold up as well as the Jabras.  They have a nifty application that administers a hearing test and adjusts the sound level as needed. That's nice.  My first impression, beyond the beautiful sound is that they are unbalanced -- the left ear is ever so lightly lower volume than the right or perhaps my left ear is weaker, although the hearing test didn't find that. I was hoping for an old fashioned balance control in the app but I couldn't find one.  Maybe it's the seal and I just need to try a different set of silicone pads.  Either way, I have to give the 'buds good marks.  Anker Soundcore A40 lives up to its good rep.

Down South it's a different problem.  The best solution I found was bone conduction headphones.  These transmit music through vibrations to the bones in your ear rather than forcing sound through the ear canal.  Or something like that.  In any event you get to privately hear your music without anything blocking your ears at all.  It's kind of strange at first but then you don't notice it.  The only difference between them and regular earbuds is that you can hear every sound going on around you, which is what I need when walking the ridiculous dog.

My first set was from a company called Kaibo that I bought through their kickstarter. At first they sounded spectacular, I was stunned by how high quality the sound was for bone conduction.  The problem was the damn things would not work.  Half the time only one side would function.  And the touch controls were so sensitive that even just adjusting them on my head would trigger a power down or a song skip or something.  Even when I wanted to take an action, the clicks and swipes to adjust them were so complex and the instructions so inscrutable I couldn't figure it out.  Finally I went onto their support site about the one side cutting out and found it was quite a common complaint.  They offered a workaround that involved moving files on your laptop and performing some sort of ritual that many people reported did no good, and was not available to anyone who didn't have a Windows laptop.  When Mac users asked what they should do, the response was "Find a Windows laptop".

Eventually I got so frustrated with them that I threw them in the trash.  That was my second participation in a kickstarter and both the products I was involved with ended up being trash.

Still, I was sold on bone conduction and the big name in bone conduction is Shokz. I bought their cheapest model because although I was sold on bone conduction, I had a bit of shell shock from Kaibo.  Also because the cheapest model had actual buttons, not touch controls, which I hate.  Well the Shokz work well.  And I appreciate the buttons, but the sound is pathetic.  It almost sounds like mono.  There is very little definition.  It's listenable, but just barely.  Functionally I like the Shokz and I may upgrade eventually in the hopes of better sound quality, but for now I'll live with it as I have spent WAY too much money on earbuds just to get to this point.

I'll stop now having written almost 1000 words about earbuds and wasting a fair amount of your time if you've gotten this far.

Addendum: Speaking of sound, one thing I have noticed is that most of the young people I know seem perfectly happy to listen to music through the horrible tinny speakers on their phones.  I can't stand it.  It sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.  How can you appreciate music that way?

[Music] Changes in Gratitude

I guess you could call me a Jimmy Buffet fan.  I wasn't always.  As a sneering, snarky youth I scoffed at his silly songs which I passed off as some kind of limp country pop.  I probably came to like him in my late 20s as I lost my hard edge and I fell for the simple catchiness of the tunes that would earworm their way into my brain.  

The more I listened, the more I appreciated it.  The big thing about Jimmy was always his beach bum persona; the carefree, sun-drenched, margarita-sipper in the aloha shirt, representing everything you long for as you pound your head against your office cube wall and shovel the snow from your driveway.

Here's the thing, I have had more than one opportunity to live that sort of life.  The dirty secret is that, like many fantasies, it gets boring real fast once the novelty wears off.  You can spend only so many aimless days in a lounge chair sipping fruity drinks and devouring beach books.  And you would be stunned how fast you gain weight from margaritas.  The plain fact is that we all need something to do.  If I truly found myself on a beautiful tropical island with little to do except chill, I would probably be drinking bourbon nonstop and obsessively gambling on Draft Kings.  That said, it's fun for a week or two at a time, so in that sense, Jimmy nailed it.

I think what most people miss about Jimmy is that there was more to it than that persona.  The celebration of inebriated slacking would wear thin in short order, but ultimately, that wasn't the underlying theme he brought to the table. Considering his entire oeuvre, I would sum up his mission in one word: Gratitude.  Sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain; ultimately we appreciate it all.

• Some of it's magic, some of it's tragic, but I had a good life all the way

• Wrapped myself around a Ma Bell telephone pole…Life is just a tire swing  

• Everyone here is just more than contented to be livin' and dyin' in ¾ time

• Roll with the punches…made the best of whatever came his way

• Survivors of tidal waves, Children of former slaves…They'll be changing channels, always will

• There's a little bit of fruitcake left in every one of us

• We all know, just how lucky we are

All these lyrics and so many others convey gratitude for life and humanity, with all defects and difficulties that come with it.  That is the truly enduring message.

Beyond that, I also think Jimmy is very underrated as a songwriter, again by those who pass him off as nothing but a fantasy persona.  Bob Dylan called out his admiration for his songs, as has Paul McCartney, yet for some reason he doesn't seem to get looped into the greatest songwriter conversations.  His ability to construct clever rhymes is really second to none, he has a great variety in meter and, of course, he can compose a hook as well as anyone.  Let me just link some of my favorites (Links to YouTube):

That's What Living is to Me -- a call out to Mark Twain, this is wonderfully crafted and perfectly sung.  If I had to choose one song to describe Jimmy Buffet music it would be this one. Marvelous character images, a great hook, the contrast of happiness and sorrow -- "In the far off regions, the foreign legions keep the thieves and the predators at bay" vs. "stories from my favorite books still take on many different looks".

Changing Channels -- Another one with a strong sense of gratitude for the life we are given. The quiet poetry of the mundane.  The beauty of the everyday.  A truly lovely ballad. 

The Ballad of Skip Wiley -- Characters from a Carl Hiassen beach read.  Swanky horns like an old school caper.  A good example of his use of meter.  It also contains what might be my favorite rhyme in all the universe.  "With a pirate's persona / he snatched the gridiron madonna".  Too much fun.

And if I had to pick a favorite album I'd start with Fruitcakes wonderful infectious songs covering the gamut, call outs for the title song and Delaney Talks to Statues, a beautiful song for his daughter, or more correctly about his love for his daughter.

Another connection I feel for Jimmy is his love of, and call outs for, Florida, a state you can only appreciate if you can take the yin and the yang, the blue skies and ultra-violet rays, the riches and son-of-a-bitches.  Rarely does an album go by without a Florida reference I recognize and have experienced.

As I have aged my sense of gratitude has grown and Jimmy's music has certainly helped that along, and in turn fed my gratitude for having been able to enjoy it.  No question my Jimmy Buffet playlist will be in heavy rotation to the last.

Thank you, Jimmy.

[Movies, TV, Music, Good Links] Entertainment Consumables

Quick hits on sound and vision.

• Knives Out is weird. A solid drawing room style murder mystery, it made some waves because people assigned it socio-political meaning. I suppose there was possibly that intent, I don't know. I do know it was a very impressively-plotted mystery, speaking as someone who understands how difficult that is. What I think ultimately holds it back is the casting. There were a lot of high-end names associated with this, none of whom were particularly believable in their roles -- especially Daniel Craig. They do their level best but none transcend their miscasting. Not a bad bit of entertainment, but ultimately little more than a curiosity.
• Midway -- There have been two movies about the battle of Midway, one in 1976 and one in 2019. Both have been less than mediocre. This latest one has little to no character development, the pilots were so undifferentiated I couldn't remember why I was supposed to care about whom. Lip service to the wives back home was empty. Even the action scenes were unaffecting. It was mostly vanilla dramatizations of commonly known events. Skip this one. It's a shame. The Battle of Midway deserves a more Band of Brothers-y treatment.
• Theme Time Radio Hour -- Radio show, or perhaps a podcast(?), hosted by Bob Dylan as a sort of old school DJ. I've been working my way through the episodes. Dylan reaches way back, often as far back as the '30s, to find songs to match the theme. It's a good antidote to standard broadcasting or machine formed playlists.
• Sleep With Me, I may have mentioned this podcast before, but I've recently gone back to it to help me chill. Essentially it is a guy droning on, telling rambling stories, or absent-mindedly recapping TV episodes in a meandering, monotonous kind of way. If you are trying to follow the narrative, you are doing it wrong. It is amiable and aimless with the intent that it lingers at the edge of your conscious mind and eases you into sleep. It absolutely works for me.
• Perry Mason - the latest series from HBO. Old folks will remember Perry Mason as a TV lawyer played by Raymond Burr in the '50s and '60s. Here we go back to his origin as a skid row private eye in the '30s. The effect is a bit strained, as if everything was laboring to send a message or to make an important point. I also don't know if I buy Matthew Rhys as the lead. It's full of darkly motivated characters, as noirish as it gets, but feels a little too inorganic. Still, we're only three episodes in. If it pans out I may comment more.
• Wendover Productions -- Not strictly "entertainment", this is a YouTube channel that cranks out 15 minute videos explaining how some key and complex aspects of commerce work. How Airports make (or lose) money. How long-haul trucking works. The thing here is that these are short and to the point, versus, say, a Discovery Channel show that has to fill in 30-60 minutes. Nothing revelatory, just keenly interesting to those with active and inquisitive minds.

[Music, Rant] Background Music

I never truly listen to music anymore. Oh I have music on very often, but almost always to accompany some other activity. When driving I cycle through my XM presets. At the gym I have Amazon Music playlists. Running I have my little SanDisk on shuffle. Before bed I usually troll Ted Gioia's annual 100 best lists to find something to read by. About the closest I come to paying close attention to music is when a band on Austin City Limits catches my ear (recently Cage the Elephant).

It was not always so throughout my teens and early twenties I often spent time with headphones on just focusedly listening to music. And while it's easy to pass this off as a change of aging, it's also possible that there was more to it.

The tone of this article is annoying, but it's basically correct. The thesis is that 1980, the year of London Calling by The Clash and The River by Bruce Springsteen, was the end of rock and roll as a cultural force. This is very hard to disagree with. To be clear, I don't mean the end of rock music, nor do I mean the end of good rock music. Good rock and roll is being made to this day. It's hard to find, but it's out there. I mean the end of it as a vibrant cultural force. The end of it really mattering in any way.

40 years ago -- dead longer than alive. It was a great run: 1955-1980. What cultural relevance that remained in music went to Rap and Hip-Hop. Now even that has long passed its era of importance. Music has virtually no cultural weight at all.

What was lost in 1980 -- what best selling music no longer has -- was a certain sense of authenticity. Musicians formed or self-organized into bands that played proper musical instruments. It was probably mostly a pretense of authenticity, but at least it was honored. The kid with a guitar shows talent and makes it. As weird and hedonistic as the rock musicians could be, they also kept in touch with the fantasy.

Everything since has pretty much eschewed the image of organic success. Rappers, boy bands, American Idols, howling diva twerk-bots, have all fully embraced their own manufacturing. They are the products of marketing formulas as much as talent, if not moreso, and they don't try to hide it.

Of course, I always have to qualify my opinions these days because I am as susceptible as anyone my age to yelling at clouds. Kids, and some adults, still get enthusiastic about music. It still sells, especially if it is attached to a Disney animated film. (I should qualify that: it still reaches a large audience, whether it "sells" depends how you view streaming revenue.) But I just don't think it means as much to them as it did to us. In my adolescence I could put on a LP and a pair of headphones and find the strength to live in hope for one more day. Today they put in their earbuds and dream of the Tik Tok likes their lip synch will bring.

Good for them. Maybe they don't need music for hope. Maybe they have something better. Maybe -- almost certainly -- I really just miss the ability to feel that sort of life-giving enthusiasm for something. Wisdom exacts a toll that nostalgia can't replenish.

[Music, Tech] Solving Music

I have never been able to develop a sufficiently robust music strategy. I have managed to rid myself of hard media (CDs and such), but I still have mp3s from years ago and the streaming ecosphere is a confusing mess.

Nexus 5x is my main phone. It works well, or as well as any android phone (I still miss Windows Phone) and with the Google FI wireless service it's remarkably inexpensive. If I use little data (less than 1GB), my monthly bill comes in under $30, often grazing the mid $20s. A heavy data month will amount to about $33-$35. I get the strongest signal available of Sprint, T Mobile, or wi-fi for calls and texts. It's not without dead spots, but they are rare. Google FI is highly recommended.

However, I do not keep any music stored on it. It has no expandable storage so a great deal of it is used up with photos and apps. Generally, when I listen to music on mobile I have it on for an extended period -- long road trips in rental cars without Sirius/XM, or for running, or for times I am wandering around Vegas and I keep the music going as I walk the Strip.

So my music solution(s) is a haphazard mess at the moment. I keep my entire mp3 collection on my cheap little Samsung Tab E. The Tab is nice little device, which I use as a music player and alarm clock and as a very lite computer when I really don't think I need my laptop. It does the job, but it is underpowered for today's world and laggy in general -- unacceptably laggy when things get complicated. Also, it's too big for carrying around if you're on your feet.

So for running I have a bought a $30 4GB Sandisk player that's about the size of a matchbook. I have an armband for it, but it's got a little clip too. It is quite capable of holding my entire running playlist -- about 3 hours of music -- and a couple of podcasts. It is dead simple to operate and it requires so little in resources that it runs for hours and the battery is still nearly full. It is a very good running solution. Smart purchase for me.

That leaves the wandering around music sitch -- the rarest one and I am currently using my old Windows Phone as a dedicated music player for that.

The whole mess works, but it is inconvenient. I continue to search for a more holistic solution for which I keep trying to get my head wrapped around the Google Play music service. If I read it correctly, it will store all my mp3s in a locker in the cloud for streaming at anytime. If that was the case, I could get a main phone with the longest battery life possible and I could, theoretically use it for all my music listening while having nothing stored on the phone itself. A very tempting notion. The cost to me would be about $200 a year, I estimate, when you figure in the $10/month for a Google Play music subscription and another $8-ish dollars for the data overages. I'd still need to keep my Sandisk for the occasional run in places where I would have no service.

It seems to me there would be a market for a cheap dedicated music streaming device via subscription that included a data only cell connection and wi-fi. Say, $15.99 per month including device, cloud storage for owned music, streaming from a large library, bluetooth, cell data service, and wi-fi. Make it sweatproof and you've got something just about perfect for 90% of the time. Hmmm. I hereby patent this idea (can I do that?).

No don't get me started on video streaming. Maybe next time.

Addenda: And what's up with music subscription services, am I right? I need to pick one.

• Pandora is an inexpensive option, but the library is very limited.
• Spotify is the top dog but I had a bad time of it during the free trial. It kept stopping in the middle of playlists for no good reason other than to annoy me. Research suggested this happens on Android from time to time, but it was happening to me all the time. I cancelled before the trial ended.
• Apple Music (formerly iTunes) only works well with the Apple ecosphere, or so the reviews would have me believe.
• Groove Music (formerly XBox music, formerly Zune) is a possibility since I still have warm fuzzies for my old Zune player and I generally find Microsoft products have sweet interfaces, but it is new compared to other services and so playlists might be slim. It will store my mp3s in the cloud for me.
• Amazon is now offering a pay service over and above it's standard Prime service. Standard prime is a blessing because it's free with your prime sub and it's about on par with Pandora for songs. The premium service promises to step it up on par with the big players. It has the advantage of allowing an annual purchase at a discount. This is currently my second choice.
• There are other services -- Slacker, I Heart Radio, Sirius/XM has a service beyond their satellite broadcast. You could make a career of following these.
• As I mentioned above, my current odds on favorite is Google Play Music. It will store my music on the cloud and it also includes a sub to YouTube Red, which would kill all the YouTube ads. There is also quite good music on YouTube.

Think I'll start up that free trial and see how it goes.

The world continues to get more complicated.

[Music] Quadrophenia

Let's take a trip back in time, to the era of classic rock. In the fall of 1973, The Who released their sixth album, Quadrophenia. It was quite a success commercially -- it reached #2 in both the US and UK -- but more importantly it is probably the only rock album conceived as a whole that has appreciated in artistic merit over the years.

When I say conceived as a whole, I mean the entirely of the album is designed for a certain effect or around a certain theme -- conceptual theme, not just commonalities in song titles or genre. The first prominent example of this that I can think of in rock is the Moody Blues Days of Future Passed from 1967. (I know, Sgt. Pepper was from ‘67 but it was never intended to be conceptual. For that matter neither was Abbey Road. The Beatles never did a concept album.)

The Who really glommed on to the idea of such thematics. Their third album, The Who Sell Out, a contemporary of the Moody Blues' Days… was structured as a pirate radio broadcast with jingles and fake commercials in between the songs making it a concept album in a more gimmicky sense, but also contained a short song that was identified as a mini-rock opera. A rock opera was where The Who went next with Tommy three years later.

A rock opera is really just a concept album with a narrative. Tommy was not the first rock opera; there had been a couple released in the late sixties to little acclaim or commercial success. Tommy, in contrast, was an astounding success. I recall "studying" it in Junior High School English class, for some reason. (Probably because all the public school teachers fancied themselves cool rebels who knew what was hip. Now I decry it as dumbing down, but back then I would have had zero interest in, say, Samuel Johnson. Also, get off my lawn.)

Enormous success aside, I don't think Tommy has fared all that well over time. The songs are still good quality pop songs and the hits get plenty of classic rock airplay, but it just doesn't hit home as a piece of art. The theme of the rise and fall of a false god is a little strained. Anyway, gods don't rise anymore, they just fall. The movie featured some interesting covers of the songs, and Ann Margret, but it really just a curiosity more than anything else.

The Who moved on, changing tone entirely to the monumental Who's Next, which is so loaded with enduring classics that it's probably the album you hand to someone from Mars who never heard classic rock. Also it marked a shift to more personal songs. The Who always had anger in their songs, but with Who's Next, the anger became more pointed and personal.

So in that sense, Quadrophenia was sort f the culmination of the development of The Who: An angry, desperate, deeply personal rock opera. The story is somewhat autobiographical: a mod named Jimmy is a standard rebellious working class kid in early 60s England. He is generally a wastrel, hangs out with his wastrel friends, doing wastrel things and such as popping pills and getting in gang fights. Just another disaffected youth. In fact, just the sort of person the The Who played for in their early years as a mod-hero band, and to some extent just the sort of person they were. In fact, Jimmy was described as a young man with for personalities -- Quadrophenia -- each corresponding to a different member of The Who.

The four personalities thing is pretty much unnecessary. Jimmy is a confused adolescent swimming in a sea of hormones and chemicals. Rare is the human male who won't identify. This is a key difference from Tommy. It's not detached allegory, it's something very relatable and genuine.

But the thing that really elevated Quadrophenia was that the story was clarified by the non-musical ephemera that came with it. On the cover was a narrative, written in the voice of Jimmy, in perfect colloquial mod voice -- it was quite lovely. You can read it here. It's a few paragraphs that put you deeper in Jimmy's head and voice for very nice effect. Also in the package was a large photo book, filled with black & whites depicting Jimmy at various points in his journey, that really captured the look and feel of working class England in the early 60s. This youtube vid walks you through the photos. They are really quite astounding.

If this makes it all sound more like a multi-media exercise than a record album, it is; but that's not to say the music is insufficient on its own. The music is a remarkable blend of the standard Who agro-power with what is probably the most melodic and sensitive arrangements they ever achieved and interwoven with moody natural sound effects. It's the sort work you can hear a hundred times and pick up something new every time.

All this is in my head at the moment because I recently saw a documentary about the making of Quadrophenia on Palladia, one the nine million eight hundred and thirty-two channels I get on Charter. (It's actually a couple of years old. I think it aired in 2012 on the BBC.) It was jam packed with interesting details on the state of the Who at that time. To summarize, Keith was so messed up on drugs that he actually collapsed on stage and they brought in someone from the audience who could play a bit of drums to finish the set. Their producer was so messed up on drugs that Pete fired him and took on the entire workload. The workload was so huge because, and this was something I didn't know, Pete's process to create a record was to write the songs and record all the parts on tape at home, the present the entirely to the rest of the band who would interpret it. So basically he was doing everything.

The rest of the band however, did not appreciate that and often bristled, feeling like they were being treated as nothing more than session musicians. It is not the case at all that they were glorified session musicians, of course.There is no way the Who would be what they were without the other personalities and talents -- you don't hire session musicians that can bring such distinction and style as John and Keith had. Roger asserted himself by forbidding Pete to be in the studio when he recorded his vocals. In fact the animus between the two was so great that Pete threw punches at Roger and Roger uppercutted him to floor. More interestingly, Pete was not a fan of Keith's drumming. He wished there were times when he would just keep the beat instead of being a madman. This was bad thinking. When Keith died he was replaced with exactly such a drummer to no good end musically.

And, like the standard rock and roll cliche, out of all this bedlam came a tremendous pile of music. In the words of Pete, "Quadrophenia was the last great album we did."

And great it was. I hope I'm not coloring it with my nostalgia, but I really think when all is said and done and we look back at the second half of the 20th century it will be one of the pieces that stands out as a top ten musical work. So, recommendations: Listen to the album, try to find the ephemera, watch the movie, see the documentary. All worth your time.

[Music] Dwarves, Uncrushed

Dwarves, Uncrushed: On a whim, I re-listened to a record (I call it a record because the first time I heard it was on a actual record player) that I maintain is one of the underappreciated works of art in the last half-century: Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers, a comedy album by The Firesign Theatre. I can also safely state that you'll probably not feel the same way.

We live in the time of the comedy of personal discomfort. Prior to that was a tsunami of irony. Prior to that was sketch comedy. Prior to that was parody. There has always been cross-pollination among those. There is still parody today and there was discomfort half a century ago, but I think that is roughly the order that the primary comedy fashion has passed through in my lifetime, each with variations that are based on either manners or raunch. Don't Crush That Dwarf... arose in 1970 at the cusp of the parody/sketch transformation, so it is a form of comedy that no one is all that familiar with anymore. There are cultural references from long ago (Vietnam, the Rosenbergs, old time radio) that no one will get. And it's a comedy record. Like a stand-up routine or an improv troupe, sound only. Kind of like a book-on-tape or a podcast. So what I'm saying is that it's weird content and a weird format. To you. To us oldsters it's fairly common.

Firesign Theatre produced a number of sketch/parody albums back then, generally good material -- they're a talented bunch, but Dwarf... was one of those rare moments in entertainment where everything comes together and the whole of the product transcends the genre.

Ostensibly an "ages of man" narrative following one character through various stages of his life mapped onto an evening of him flipping channels on the TV. That whole idea is soon swamped in a relentless firehose blast of over-the-top caricature and seamless malapropisms peppered into a cross-talking melange of linked dialogue, often tying foreground and background threads into a nice little poetic bow, eventually spiraling into a causality defying vortex of aural madness.

And no, I was not tripping at the time.

But again, I have to emphasize that you probably won't see it like that. It will be too strange to you if you are young. And if you are old (like me) you will have long passed the age where that sort of oddball beauty appeals. Luckily it won't cost you too much to find out. Amazon has the album available for download at $9.99, but note: There are only two tracks (corresponding to each side of the record), and they are available for 99 cents each. That's right, you can buy the whole album for $9.99 or you can download the two tracks individually for $1.98. Obviously a glitch in the Amazon matrix, but it's certainly worth exploiting.

If you're going to try this despite my warnings: Listen to it. The listen again. Then listen again, this time to everything going on in the background. Then listen a fourth time to take in the full effect. With your mind blown, you can thank me later.

[Music] Rest in Peace, Davy

Rest in Peace, Davy: Up until about third grade I was the shortest kid in class. Even shorter than all the girls. (I have since turned out to be average height, exactly.) Anyone who was in a similar situation knows the trauma involved in that. But Davy Jones was the shortest Monkee, and we had the same first name, and frankly, we even looked a bit alike. That helped.

I loved the Monkees. I can still name their first five albums from memory: (1) The Monkees, (2) More of the Monkees, (3) Headquarters, (4) Pieces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, (5) The Birds, The Bees, and The Monkees. All of these were rife with brilliant pop songs of the sort that come along only once every few years. Very few bands have ever put together such a brilliant oeuvre. I have, ever since, been a sucker for perfectly crafted 3 minute pop songs.

Anyone one of those five albums is would be a pop masterpiece today. Yes, I know that the songs were all written by the top songwriters money could buy. And the musicians were the best session players money could buy. And the producers were under marching orders to make something marketable. But think about that. Can you imagine any corporate interest trying something like that today and generating anything like the quality of music?

Their sound was hugely influential on the best popsters of the '90s -- the Shibuya-kei style from Japan. And given modern production values, their music would match up easily with the best pop of the last 10 years -- say, Barenaked Ladies and Fountains of Wayne, for example. The songs are as exuberant and energetic as they were 45 years ago. If anything, doing that while under corporate control only makes the achievement greater.

Davy was the face; the cute boy all the girls could crush on. He could sing (but not as well as Dolenz); he could act and even dance a bit; he lacked the musical talent of Tork and especially Nesmith, but he had a friendly charisma and seemed to brighten the atmosphere.

He always wanted to be a jockey (interesting that horse racing has come up in three of my posts this month), but his natural charm led him into acting and that was that. Never was a bad word said about him. His good and unassuming nature were roundly praised upon his death.

Of course, people like me don't actually mourn Davy Jones proper. We express gratitude for the positive affect he had on us. What we really mourn is the loss of our ability to experience the feelings he facilitated in our childhood (even the trauma of being the shortest one in class) and, by extension, our own mortality. I would never wish my youth on anyone, but there are things I miss: the revelry of playing catch all afternoon, conquering a video game, or a hearing a familiar Monkees song. Those activities are still possible but they will never be enjoyed so thoroughly. That innocent vitality, like Davy, is gone forever.

[Music] Talkin' Bout, Pop Music

Talkin' Bout, Pop Music: I have, since my earliest encounter with The Monkees at age 6, been a complete sucker for the tightly crafted energetic pop songs. So I was saddened to hear of the death of Doug Feiger, leader of the early eighties pop band The Knack, and my suburban Detroit homey. (For those familiar: Feiger grew up in Oak Park around Nine Mile and Coolidge, I grew up in Southfield around Eleven Mile and Greenfield. Figure a couple of miles separated as the crow flies.)

Most people think of the Knack as a one hit wonder because radio stations played "My Sharona" until ears were bleeding coast to coast. In reality, that first album they released in 1979, Get the Knack was an absolute masterpiece. "My Sharona" and it's single follow up "Good Girls Don't" were top notch FM fodder, but the album is loaded down with pop gems as catchy and as tightly woven as anything on A Hard Day's Night or Help. My personal favorite: "That's What the Little Girls Do" which could be a yard stick for any two and a half minute power pop song. (Also, The Knack were clearly the most sexually frustrated band that ever lived, which probably struck a chord with many young men my age.)

Their next two follow up albums were fine too, but fashion is fickle and there was so much backlash against the success of the first and the ungodly repetition on the radio that nobody was really listening anymore. Various comebacks in the '90s got mixed reviews. Anyway, no pop collection is complete without Get the Knack. It holds up well musically -- really, really well; not just as nostalgia.

Speaking of not-nostalgia pop, a hearty recommendation goes to Vinyl Candy's 2009 release, Land. Here's the band and album description from their website:

Vinyl Candy is a Southern California indie rock outfit with features a richly talented young quartet whose seamless sound welds a mix of influences from The Beatles to Jellyfish to Oasis to Butch Walker. July of 2009 ushered in the release of Vinyl Candy's second album "Land". A concept album which takes the listener on a whirlwind journey from one rock stars rise to demise.

I also got a strong hint of Beach Boys from Land; it brought to mind Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile, which is stratospheric company.

The album is higher in concept than most pop, and it draws a bit on the baroque tradition of Pink Floyd, but infectious melodies and soaring harmonies in strongly written three minute songs are front and center throughout. Great stuff. I get the sense that this is a band that has the potential to go ballistic and kick out an album with like eight top ten hits. That is, if albums were relevant anymore, or there were such things as top ten hits.

Music in My Ears

Music in My Ears: I write a lot about what I watch and read, but I rarely seem to write about what I listen to. My listening habits are somewhat diverse.

In the car I have Sirius, and I have rarely strayed from the channel 25, Little Steven's Underground Garage (Caution: Auto-playing sound! Turn your speakers down.) The best description I can think of for the music is that it is (generally) any rock and roll that is avid and enthusiastic while not being not affected or high-concept. You might hear an old Kinks song, then something from a Scandinavian garage band, then doo-wop, then an old Delta blues song, then the Clash, then a semi-kitsch Nancy Sinatra, then Otis Redding, then a Beatles outtake, then the Ramones, and so on. It has two great qualities that you can't usually get -- it isn't obsessed with commercial success, and you never know what to expect. Unique in radio, as far as I can tell.

When I'm working (meaning writing - not day job) at home or on the road with wi-fi, I find myself tuning into Pandora. A brilliant concept -- you enter the name of an artist or song you like and it searches through its database of music and starts playing similar songs or artists -- with dead simple execution: you simply go to the site, enter the artist/song and the music begins. It stores your selections as "radio stations," of which you may have up to one hundred. It's available to you anywhere there is an internet connection, including your iPhone (and presumably Android and Palm Pre, if not now, soon) which would be the only reason I'd have for a smartphone at the moment. Their own description of the service gives you an idea of what their target is. (They have an equally capable competitor called Last.fm, which has been snapped up by CBS, I think.)

At the gym, I listen to Trance. Trance is a sub-genre of electronica. It features very regular, driving beats and hypnotic melodic forms (I won't call them actual melodies because, in my aged mind, a melody is something you can hum), preferably without vocals. The point it is to sort of get lost in it, which makes me sound like some kind of hippie, but it's what I want at the gym -- to just get into an energetic rhythm and lose track of time as I work out. Yes, it's weird. Anyway, I really don't know the inside scoop on Trance other than a few big names -- Oakenfold, Digweed, Tiesto -- which probably mean nothing to you. They don't mean much to me either. The artists in Trance are DJs who remix the works of others into the Trance genre. The best thing about this type of music is that you can download extended mix sets, often up to two hours long, as single MP3s for free from any number of sites. New Mixes was one of them; although it appears to have died back in April, there are still downloads available. Other sites such as djmixes.net also provide links to free mixes although you have to jump through a few hoops, such as registration, and deal with slow download services. These sets are often only radio quality (because they often come from radio shows) but they are legal and free and good enough for the gym.

In any other circumstances -- such as flying or generally being out without my laptop or wi-fi -- I just listen to my Zune which contains, just about every sort of music you can imagine, from Bach to Sonny Rollins to Fountains of Wayne to Aaron Copeland to Louis Armstrong to Ursula 1000 to Steven Reich to Southern Culture on the Skids to Diana Krall, and a smattering of audiobooks to boot. Most of this has come from ripping used CDs and snagging el cheapo downloads from Amazon (they have a lot for free, and you can search within genre based on album price). I wish I could give some kind of rhyme or reason behind this mess but there is none, except perhaps ADD.

So there's some context for when I start doing music reviews.

Music Appreciation

Music Appreciation: My appreciation of Classical music is fairly stunted. I know the basics -- Beethoven Symphonies, Mozart Concertos, etc. And I know enough to know I like Bach above everyone (I have the Gould's Goldbergs, Tureck's Well-Tempered Clavier, and Orch. of the Enlightenment's Brandenbergs, and Julliard String Quartet's Art of the Fugue -- all on my Zune). Beyond that, I'm pathetic. Over the course of the month I stumbled on a couple of articles that caused me to wonder if any classical had even been created in my lifetime, 'cause I sure couldn't name anything.

Well the first idea that came up was that Classical music as an accessible product now exists almost solely for film scores. Certainly, I'd heard of John Williams, hadn't I? But there are many others: Bernard Herrmann scored numerous Hitchcock flicks among others, Enrico Morricone did the Clint Eastwood Westerns among others, Aaron Copland did some astounding work for film, but that was a bit before my lifetime. I just never made the connection in my brain that I was hearing modern Classical music. So there you go.

But of non-film based classical music one CD consistently showed up on recommended lists far and wide: Steven Reich's Different Trains. So I snagged a copy. It is absolutely mesmerizing. Different Trains uses a string quartet wherein the different instruments repeat a melody based on a spoken phrase that is related to train travel. The actual spoken phrases are interwoven with the melodies played on the instruments. The work is divided into three movements 1) America-before the war, 2) Europe-during the war, and 3) After the war. The phrases, and even the speakers, are connected to those time periods. It is virtually impossible to describe this work, other than to say it works very well and it is a remarkably appropriate and coherent use of sampling, which is rare in Classical works.

But it does beg the question, what makes this Classical music? Given the use of sampling why is this not considered some variation of the Electronica or Ambient genres. It uses sampled spoken words, sound effects and standard instrumentation in combination. It certainly eschews what might be considered traditional musical formats. How does this become classical music as opposed to, say, avant-garde electronica. I don't know? I don't doubt that there is a reason, which may be beyond my musical understanding. I'd just be curious to know what it is.

Fabulous piece of music, whatever it is.

Different Trains is usually combined on CD with another work, Electric Counterpoint, which is also quite beautiful. A looping mesh of guitars; bass and tenor, live and sampled. Also recommended.

P.S. Microsoft came through with an update to the Zune player software that allows for gapless playback (see last month's complaint), which is needed to for these pieces. Great timing MS!

Music Unappreciated

Music Unappreciated: While we are on the topic of my musical confusion. Three bands that have enormous and loyal followings, but I can't stand:

• U2 -- Boy came out in, what was it, '79? '80? I remember listening to it in my fraternity and finding no attraction whatsoever. Now nearly thirty years later, Bono is rich and obnoxious beyond any rock star's dreams but my feelings haven't changed. Every song of theirs I've heard over the years sounds utterly conventional and soulless to my ears.


• Radiohead -- OK, Computer is often spoken of as one of the greatest albums ever. I can't even force myself to listen to the previews of the songs on Amazon. It just sounds so dreary to me. But its success spawned a tidal wave of equally dreary "alt rock" that completely dominated the airwaves in the '90s and early '00s. I suppose I should thank them and their spawn for driving me to the loving arms of Sirius.


• Dave Matthews -- This guy has an enormous live following, on the same scale as the Grateful Dead in their heyday. I really can't explain why I don't like Dave Matthews except to say his voice and lyrics make me think (irrationally, perhaps) of a perfect, sensitive hipster. I bet this is what the folks from Cloverfield listened to. Makes me press seek.