Mellotron Mania

Some pretty amazing Mellotron music for free download can be found here. A fellow named Mike Dickson owns a Mellotron M400, a mixer, some computer with recording software, a measure of musical ability, and apparently a certain amount of time on his hands. So, he recorded All-Mellotron versions of Holst's "Mars, The Bringer of War" (inspired by King Crimson's assaults on the tune nearly 40 years ago), swell interpretations of Adagios by Albinoni and Barber, Bach's famous "Air on The G String", Taco Bell's Pachelbel's Greatest Hit "Canon in D major*", and so on... Very nicely done, and worth every penny!

For more authentic orchestral sounds, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra has free samples of their recordings (generally complete movements from larger works) available for the asking here. Click on the "MSO To Go" picture, surrender an e-mail address, and broaden your horizons. Also recommended.

*For playing along at home, try these variations on a Ground Beef Bass: D-A-Bm-F#m-G-D-G-A

A Ha Ha Ha Ha Hah

This appeared in the Spam Folder today:

Security and confidentiality are at the heart of the Associated Bank. Your details (and your money) is protected by a number of technologies, including Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption.
We would like to notify you that Associated Bank carries out customer details confirmation procedure that is compulsory for all our customers. This procedure is attributed to a routine banking software update.

Gotta love the grammar of those phishing-for-passwords e-mails. Kids, moms, and grandmas, never click the links in these! Even in the unlikely event that they manage to stop mixing plural and singular referents in such an amusing manner. Your details is protected! Note that while the link is supposedly to http://bolb9.associatedbank.com/, the link shown when you hover over it is actually ww1.associatedbank.com.4ssl.ws/, not the same thing!!!

Viv & Roy

Former Bonzo Dog Band front man and head loon, the late Vivian Stanshall, with Roy Wood, founder of the Move, ELO and Wizzard, apparently during the recording of some version of Tommy in 1973. What a pair.

Nik "Pascal" Raicevic - Head LP (Buddah BDS-5062 - 1970)



At the bottom it says, "Inside you will find something colorful to do with your hands while you're listening to this album." A coloring book of some kind was apparently included with the LP.

A New Wigu Webcomic Storyline Has Begun!



Way to go, Jeffrey Rowland. Updated wigu.com link is to the left.

So, What's Your Point?

Cereal Mascot Reunion

Jan & Dean - Singles, Cars & Girls

Back in the seventies, United Artists released a series of double-LP anthology albums called Legendary Masters, or something like that, attempting to flog some sales out of artists that really weren't considered very hip anymore, like Fats Domino, Ricky Nelson, and Jan & Dean.



The gatefold of the Jan & Dean album included an amusing chart delineating the equipment their hit singles were recorded on, chart success, et cetera, and most amusingly, what cars the boys were driving and who their girlfriends were at the time. (Click on the picture to see a legible version.)


This is the album that contains this fine sociological data, but I don't know if the CD version includes all the informative notes from the vinyl release.

An Achewood Cartoon: Lyle Crushes Teodor's Budding Appreciation of the Grateful Dead



The views of the cartoonist are not necessarily those of the blogger. I actually like a rather large number of Dead songs. I used to have a pretty meager opinion of all those live Dead tapes since WMSE used to broadcast about 3 hours of hissy low-fidelity audience recordings every Friday evening... However, the Dick's Picks series and live things I've heard from archive.org and even more esoteric locations have led me to concede that they could, indeed, make interesting and accessible music in a live setting... There have been some very nice legit archive mainstream releases in the last couple decades, too. The compact disc format, and digital storage, transmission and manipulation of music in general, has served the Dead's Live legacy well, in my opinion. It's nice to not have to turn the record over every 17 to 22 minutes, for one thing. Also, the average tape deck generally provided pretty average sound reproduction, whereas the average CD player and computer sound card deliver performance to drool for by 1970's standards. Relatively inexpensively, too. Don't you think? Or don't you?

Self-Improvement

Heh. Or something. The book was co-written by my old high school friend, Tom Potter. I'm still only about halfway through it, because I keep getting sidetracked with other books and such. The India Pale Ale is one of the better IPA's I've had: adequate bite but not aggressively bitter. Lora found some Brooklyn Brewery products at a supermarket of the upscale variety while visiting Rochester Hills for New Year's. We also sampled the Brown Ale, which was, again, one of the better examples of the variety I've tasted. Reasonable hoppiness, and not as caramel-sweet as many brown ales. They also had two other varieties, but the flagship Brooklyn Lager was beyond its "Best If Served By Date", and in fact, the bottles were dusty. The problems of distributing specialty beers over an extended geographic area is discussed in depth in the book. (It's called Beer School, by the way, since the flash kinda washes out the title.) In hindsight, I wish I'd at least wiped the dust off the bottles. Oh, well. I'm enjoying the book, but have a bit less interest in entrepreneurship than, perhaps, the target audience here. If it gave a more well rounded "what was going on with the protagonists outside of work" picture, I suppose it would be a different book altogether. And, the Steve & Tom Autobiography probably would have been a tougher sell to the publisher.

Okay, that's the rambling blog post for the month, just under the wire.