Kevin's Weblog

As I’ve been ripping all my CDs to MP3, a few discs have lingered; primarily mix CDs because they require me to type in all the songs and artists rather than using CDDB. I’m realizing this was a false optimization, since I’ve missed out on the pleasure of some of my favorite songs, and the memories associated with them.

I just listened to “Road Music” (subtitled “Man Can Not Live On Bourbon Alone”), a mix created by my friend Dave for the occasion of a weekend trip to Big Bear with some good friends about 6 years ago. Like most of his mixes, you wouldn’t think the track listing would hold together, combining punk, folk, country, rap, and a little Dino; but somehow it manages it.

The last track of the album is “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” by Richard Thompson, which is probably one of my favorite songs of all time. It’s amazing fingerpicking behind a poignantly beautiful tale of reckless youth.

Says James, in my opinion, there’s nothing in this world
Beats a ’52 Vincent and a red headed girl.
Now Nortons and Indians and Greeveses won't do,
They don’t have a soul like a Vincent ’52.
He reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys.
He said, I've got no further use for these
I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome
Swooping down from heaven to carry me home.
And he gave her one last kiss and died
And he gave her his Vincent to ride

I had to play it twice in a row, it’s that good.

(That song also brings back memories of the first time I went to Las Vegas, and we went to the Guggenheim’s The Art of the Motorcycle, which is the only time I’ve seen one of these mythic machines.)

I’ve been listening to Indie 103.1 a lot lately. Partly because it’s pledge week on KPCC and partly because it’s playing the most interesting music I’ve heard on the radio in years. I’m really digging the eclecticness of it. Yesterday morning my morning drive was Elton John followed by some thrashing punk followed by what I think was Flogging Molly. On the way home, Nirvana was juxtaposed with Frank Sinatra.

I suppose that some people would find this sort of genre-bending completely intolerable, but I like it. It takes me back to those days in grad school that we spent bar hopping around LA and thought nothing of loading up a junk box with a sequence like Tom Waits, Social Distortion, Johnny Cash, Iggy Pop, Frank and Dino, and Black Sabbath.

Update, late 2007: Of course, they’re gone now.