this almost makes me want to vote for her

[Just Some Girl]

so K__ and i are starting to plan our next vacation.  we're looking at the first week(10 days) in october.  K__ has never been west of the mississippi unless you consider new orleans/algiers west of the mississippi.  so we're doing a western thing.  we are gonna fly into denver, rent a car, and go to boulder.  get shitty. find some live music.  then cross the rocky mountain parkway and head to dinosaur national monument.  camp there. then head south to durango.  check out mesa verde and such.  camp there.  go check out shiprock and the four corners, then head to santa fe.  get a room.  head south to carlsbad caverns to do some spelunkadunk.  (drive through roswell on the way and get our picture taken with some gift shop alien antennas on our heads in front of some ufo shit.) camp at carlsbad. then go to san antonio, take a leak on the side of the alamo (thanks, ozzy!) and end up in austin.  get shitty.  check out the bats.  get up and drive 10 hours straight to pensacola. 

(jealous face)

I'm doing another southwest road trip with my pal Sue this fall, but we haven't actually figured out where/when. It'd be awesers if we were in Austin at the same time!!

[Just Some Girl]

sadly i have a bee bees greatest hits album but tis not my worst............................

the winner is leif garrett
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/Hihp_Jjdnsg" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/Hihp_Jjdnsg</a>

WORST? OMG, I hearted him! But, you know, as an actor.

( knnnnnnnnnnnch)

I can't remember all the early records -- other than kids' stuff like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang soundtrack and goofy Xmas albums. But first bunch of singles were things like The Osmonds (Puppy Love, who knows what the B-side was) and Jackson 5 and the diFranco famly. Innocent stuff like that.

Then came the Grease soundtrack, Saturday Night Fever soundtrack (and someone bought be the first Andy Gibb record for my 14th birthday... replaced by one Matthew Gosse last year for my 43rd birthday!), The Osmonds' Crazy Horses (which I still have a fondness for), then I guess I started to buy my own singles and much later, albums. I guess I mostly listened to the radio. Wanted to know what the other kids were listening to more than I felt the need to actually own the stuff.

[Just Some Girl]

I have no older siblings (and my parents are beyond nerds), so just never was exposed to cool stuff, till I actually started paying attention to my older cousin's collection, when I was 9 or 10 so...? (c. '73 or 74?) Zappa. Stones. Beatles. That's actually all I remember, but I'm sure he had other junk. Plus he had Alice Cooper snake and noose posters all over his room, which my young self of course thought was super-doop cool.

[Just Some Girl]

Alright, I'm a-gonna go roll around on the dusty Pilates ball now* and try to not feel fat.

*not code.

[matthew]

[

with my own money:

when I was 5 or 6 (1972ish)  I bought Steve Miller's 'The Joker Is Wild' cause I thought it had something to do with Batman and I have hated that song ever since.
Also around that time was Frankenstein by Edgar Winter and the pop version of theme from 2001.

All of this reminds me of Man or Astro-man?

But I received a lot of records as gifts and whatnot.

I remember being given So by Peter Gabriel.

I also absorbed a lot of my big sister's collection.

From her I discovered SWEET, ELO, QUEEN. And I also got a lot of her Beatles' records.

I was going to cite my lack of older siblings or cousins in defense of my rather dismal beginnings. We had no cable television I was in high school and I never had a radio. I knew nothing of pop culture beyond what I was subjected to by kids on my street or at my school. My few friends were even greater social rejects than I and had parents who were poorer than mine.  Most of the kids on my street were younger than me and so there were really only two sources for music (other than my mother and father's collection of 8-tracks, LPs and cassettes) and that was the music of my best friend's older brother and sister.

My sister borrowed music from this older girl next door and so I was familiarized, through her, with much of the biggest pop music of the era: Michael Jackson, Debbie Gibson, Madonna, Paula Abdul, Janet Jackson, etc. I mean, they were household names and you heard their hits everywhere you went, but I never would have heard whole albums without that connection. I was friends with the younger brother of this girl, but he had no interest in anything except sports and money, and he was on such awful terms with his older brother that he did not dare enter his room to sneak out his vast music collection. This was unfortunate, because his walls were plastered with Beatles posters and he had most everything released by the standard big names: Stones, Zepplin, Floyd, Hendrix, etc. Beatles was his thing and I he had most everything any Beatle ever released + all manner of bootlegs. So until I began to step around my friend and speak directly to the older brother when I was over, I was stuck with hearing Paula Abdul et al. (he would introduce me to Dry in 1992).

The older sister moved up into the high school two years ahead of us and landed herself in a clique where she was the only white girl. This, via my sister, I was exposed to all of that New Edition/Bobby Brown stuff, Salt n Pepa, Big Daddy Kane, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, LL Cool J, Digital Underground, Notorious B.I.G., Young MC, Queen Latifah, De La Soul, En Vogue, Bel Biv Devoe, Boyz II Men, Color Me Badd, etc, etc. I had been introduced to rap music years earlier in the attic bedroom of another friend's older brother. I have no idea where this guy was introduced to it, but he had to be one of the first white suburbanites to be into rap music, because this was years before tamer, poppier mainstream radio hits by the artists mentioned above appeared (probably 1986 or 1987, around the same time that Run DMC/Aerosmith crossed over). I remember us sneaking into the closet and dragging out this stack of NWA, Ice-T, Tone Loc, Kool Moe Dee, KRS-One records and looking them over like they were a stash of girly magazines.

Alex, a friend of mine who grew up in a foster home two blocks over introduced me to prog. He had always had a half dozen or so transient "siblings", so he was exposed to a good mix. I am not even certain that is how he got into Pink Floyd, Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, Rush, Queensryche, Supertramp, ELO, etc. He almost never went to school, and so he had a lot of time to go to the library to check things out. One of his older "brothers" lived in the basement and listened to nothing but the Who. He was the one who threw out his entire record collection when he found out Pete was gay. He is also the same one who used to call me Flashpants.

In the last years of elementary school I became extremely aware of how developmentally retarded I was socially in relation to common shared culture. I then tried to emulate those around me and tried to find what music appealed to me. I believe that lead me to single out a bizarre combination of singles I heard from various sources, most of them being electronic and beat-oriented, likely due to my early exposure to so much keyboard-heavy stuff my mom was into during the 80s. 

By the late 80s (the same time I was into Tears for Fears, Technotronic), having cut most of my ties with my neighbor (for beating me up one too many times, not for anything related to music), I was now exposed to the crap my new best friend was listening to. Eric was pretty white trash and I expect that he picked most of his music from Much Music Television. So, through him I was exposed to the recordings of MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice, House of Pain. Christ, I owned that House of Pain album...forgot about that. I recall hating Vanilla Ice the first time I heard it. I remember the fall day...I was raking my front lawn and Eric put the cassette in a boombox and started blasting it. Profanity filled the air and eventually my next door neighbour came over and gave us hell.

At the same time as this I was introduced to Weird Al Yankovic by one of my role-playing game friends and I stuck mostly with musical satire and comedy for a couple of years. I really do not know that I followed any music at this time. I bounced around with no particular interest, focusing mostly on comic books and catching up on film with a bunch of fanboys I had fallen in with.

Weird Al, of course (I say, "of course", because I have written about 50 versions of the same tale here before), would bring Nirvana to my attention in 1992 and everything changed. Realizing I was again "behind", I borrowed whatever I could from whomever I met. Beyond all of the Grunge and Alternative Rock that was in high rotation at the time, I dubbed Sloan's Pepppermint EP and a whole mix of East Coast bands from a girl who was visiting from Newfoundland with her mother and sister; borrowed PJ Harvey's Dry from my neighbour's older brother; stumbled upon Iggy Pop's American Caesar and Tom Waits' Small Change at the library; and dubbed a whole lot of stuff from my friend Alex (Pink Floyd, U2, etc.).

It was only 1994 that I finally attended my first proper concert. It was only in the tenth grade that I finally made friends with music geeks and began attending concerts. In college I was introduced to indie, shoegazer and then garage rock. I mostly worked my own path from the Grifters.

[matthew]

I have no older siblings (and my parents are beyond nerds), so just never was exposed to cool stuff, till I actually started paying attention to my older cousin's collection, when I was 9 or 10 so...? (c. '73 or 74?) Zappa. Stones. Beatles. That's actually all I remember, but I'm sure he had other junk. Plus he had Alice Cooper snake and noose posters all over his room, which my young self of course thought was super-doop cool.

So, I wasn't alone with the lack of exposure. No older siblings, cousins, friends, etc. is  tremendous setback.

Somehow my parents ended up with a copy of Welcome to My Nightmare LP and they never explained how.

I vaguely aware of the existence of George Michaels because of a poster. The teenage daughter of my sister and I's babysitter was madly in love with him; a life-sized poster of him with a Faith-era juke box adorned one of her walls. It was imposing, especially when you entered her darkened room through the long connected closets while playing hide-and-go seek.

I wonder if she ever destroyed her record collection.

[Poop Fresh-Herbed Pickles]

I heard McCain wants to up the ante by smoking crack in a cardboard box.

we seriously need to find a pissing-myself-laughing smiley.

Is there a pissing self in a cardboard box smiley?

[Doctor Rock]

 I pretty much was entirely on my own, never had the good luck of having a cool older brother, or a parent with good taste.   I first got exposure to cool music through a radio show.  I don't remember the name, but it used to play every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, from noon to 2 o'clock.  I would sometimes skip school to listen to the show.  It was broadcast by one of the Lisbon FM radio stations.  The reception was often bad, but I used to tape the show religiously, static and all, and then listen repeatedly to it.  They would play a wide variety of music, most of it British indie bands like the Jesus and Mary Chain, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, My Bloody Valentine, the stuff on 4AD... I felt instantly cool because I listened to it.  Then I immigrated to Canada, and I was once again exposed to cool music through a radio show: good old Brave New Waves, on CBC radio, weekdays at midnight, right after the news. 

[Bizarro]

Anyone have any scoop about FLAC?

I've always been kinda poopy about giving up on CDs, because mp3s just don't sound all that good to me.  I just noticed Merge is offering up my friends album in FLAC, which sounds like what I've been waiting for.. manageable uncompressed audio.

Anyone have any experience with em?

Free Lossless Audio Codec

The PF site I trade on is exclusively .FLAC and .SHN (Shorten) for audio.  Winamp will play it (you'll need a plugin for .SHN, but I think FLAC is built in).  They can be converted to .WAV files if'n you want to burn 'em for CDs (Trader's Little Helper can do that...).  They are quite big but offer no degradation of the original source.  I don't know if walk-around audio players can play them or not but that can't be hard to find out.

Traders I deal with who have much more sensitive earholes than I do absolutely insist on trading in these two formats.  MP3 is almost a dirty word in "RoIO" (Recording of Indeterminate Origin) circles.

Muchos thanks.    I have two friends right now that are thinking of bypassing CDs altogher (Miche being one of them), which I sort of see the reasoning.. so many people just open a CD once, rip it, and then have a useless piece of plastic on their hands.  but well, like I was saying, mp3s just dont totally cut it.  especially for music that you already know you like and just want to geek out on the full sonic glory.

I have probably bought fewer than a CD a year on average since 2000.

FLAC can be made to play on an iPod by replacing the OS with Rockbox.

I am reasonably happy with high grade mp3s. (256 or 320). I can hear the difference between that and FLAC, but it don't worry me none.

[Bizarro]

if you play the ending of darlin nikki backwards, it says very clearly, "hello, how are you?" "i'm fine. because i know the lord is coming soon."  i will gladly do a demonstration when y'all come down if you are interested.  it's kinda creepy.  my thinking is that during that time all the preachers were frantically searching every popular (and not so popular) album for hidden devil messages to prove that rock n roll is evil.  so prince, in all his purple genius pulled a fast one and hid christian messages to piss them off.

Here it is.

[Bizarro]

My first purchase was a cassette of Duran Duran's "Seven and the Ragged Tiger." I was seven. Virtually all of my early music purchases were dictated by MTV. I did at least, over time, gravitate toward the cooler stuff on early MTV--The Clash, Talking Heads, etc.

[full blown possession]

sadly i have a bee bees greatest hits album but tis not my worst............................

the winner is leif garrett
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/Hihp_Jjdnsg" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/Hihp_Jjdnsg</a>

WORST? OMG, I hearted him! But, you know, as an actor.

( knnnnnnnnnnnch)

I can't remember all the early records -- other than kids' stuff like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang soundtrack and goofy Xmas albums. But first bunch of singles were things like The Osmonds (Puppy Love, who knows what the B-side was) and Jackson 5 and the diFranco famly. Innocent stuff like that.

Then came the Grease soundtrack, Saturday Night Fever soundtrack (and someone bought be the first Andy Gibb record for my 14th birthday... replaced by one Matthew Gosse last year for my 43rd birthday!), The Osmonds' Crazy Horses (which I still have a fondness for), then I guess I started to buy my own singles and much later, albums. I guess I mostly listened to the radio. Wanted to know what the other kids were listening to more than I felt the need to actually own the stuff.

Sorry I'm late, and not that it matters, but Hilary didn't take that shot. One gulp is a shot. If she'd knocked it back, that would've been cool. Knocked it back and chased it with a big ol' bong hit and a big fat line - that woulda been much cooler.

LEIF GARRETT THEN I thought was COol NOW NOT SO COOL

a bong hit candidate would be nice

and i heard the darling nikki words as you described.  THat is irony there, the lyrics to darling nikki and then that message