My Day Of Music

This morning, I listened to Collective Soul's Collective Soul. 

Then I went to Chick-Fil-A for lunch.  They always have a fairly loud corporate soundtrack playing.  Mostly, nothing jumped to my attention.  They did play "Mmm Bop" (I actually had to look up the spelling of that), which I now know I still like.

I walked around doing errands to Disciplined Breakdown. 

In Plaza Art Supplies, I had to turn Ratatask off to transact.  They had a very nice cover of "I Ain't Missing You At All" playing.  The people behind the counter and I had a nice talk about how much we liked it and who might have done it and covers in general and all.  I popped out my Blackberry to look it up and was dismayed to see how many of the top Google hits credited it to Tyler Hilton without any reference to John Waite or even Tina Turner.  Damn kids, mutter mutter.

When I got home, I decided to watch some streaming movies from Netflix.

The first was a documentary about Tom Dowd, who has been a very important recording engineer.  (Could I be any more understated?)  He got the second 8-track recording setup ever made for Atlantic.  (The first was in Les Paul's kitchen or basement or something.)  He was the one who thought of using sliders instead of knobs.  He had Atlantic recording in stereo before it was possible to use it, just because it seemed like a good idea.  He has worked with pretty much everyone, it looked like.  (I mean, think of the Atlantic catalog.) Very cool story about a cool guy.  There was one amazing bit with him messing around with the tracks of "Layla" that he hadn't had his hands on since it was released.  (He introduced Clapton and Allman.)  You really have to hear the guitar parts isolated to fully appreciate that.

The second was an old feature called Orchestra Wives, from 1942.  It is about a sweet thing who marries a trumpeter and goes on the road with the band.  The band is played by Glenn Miller and his orchestra, mostly.  The music was interesting because it was not the usual Miller greatest hits.  Oh, and it had two versions of "I Got a Gal In Kalamazoo", one done straight by the orchestra and one by the Nicholas Brothers.  The whole movie is yet another reminder that music "videos" go way back, but the Nicholas Brothers number might as well have had a paleolithic MTV logo in the corner. I was amused to see a scene at the beginning with the orchestra cutting a record that illustrated some of the stuff about the early tech in the Dowd documentary.  The movie is also a reminder that the trials of life on the road were not invented in the rock era.  All it was missing from the modern template were drugs and breasts. In this movie, the band was even broken up by a wife! 

I am about to watch Rock My World, which promises to be a romp with Alicia Silverstone as a bass player who just happens to be at a British mansion when a big famous important band that needs a bass player shows up.  With some mischievious British aristocrats running around as well.   Hijinks ensue.