Merry Christmas, y’all!
Before I hop on the doghouse to eat a few bones and read the paper, I thought I’d share Studio 360’s telling of how Vince Guaraldi got hooked up with the Peanuts gang.
Hope you enjoy, and I hope your day is filled with good food, family, and holiday cheer.
Studio 360 — Vince Guaraldi: A Charlie Brown Christmas
[Editor’s Note: This is Part III of the Super-Concise Black Friday(ish) Record Spree Recap. For Part I, click here. For Part II, click here.]
Got this one from Little Amps’ other location, on the corner of State and Second in downtown Harrisburg. Also a reissue, I believe. This location’s collection was even smaller, but I wanted to take approximately half of it home, including a copy of Dr. John’s In The Right Place that I managed, somehow, to release back into the wild. I couldn’t resist this one, though.
[Editor’s Note: This is Part II of (what I just decided is called) the Super-Concise Black Friday(ish) Record Spree Recap. For Part I, click here.]
Super-devoted YHT readers already know I had eyes for the Live at the Apollo record pictured above. I was on the fence about waiting to find an older, used pressing vs. caving and buying a reissued one, but I caved in spectacular fashion, buying shiny, new reissues of both Live at the Apollo and Pure Dynamite! from Little Amps Coffee’s Green Street location in Harrisburg, PA.
When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. And then you pour some vodka in that lemonade, because stress and vodka are best friends, and Jesus didn’t invent vodka so we could sit around and watch it go bad, ya know?
Wait… what were we talking about? Lemons. Lemonade. Right.
Two things are going on right now. Thing 1 is that I went on a borderline-irresponsible record-buying spree last weekend that only partially involved Record Store Day’s Black Friday event. Thing 2 is that I have some non-YHT writing that needs to get done, leaving me less than the usual allotment of time for bloggishness. So I’m gonna do a series of quick hits on the stuff I picked up over the long weekend, starting with Roland Kirk’s The Inflated Tear.
“Give credit where credit is due.”
It’s the kind of idiomatic expression that any non-sociopath can cosign without thinking too hard about it. Like “Treat others the way you’d like to be treated,” or “Let’s order a pizza when we get back from the bar.” But GCWCID’s promise often goes unfulfilled, and there doesn’t even have to be a good reason why. No villain, no deliberate deception or cover-up. Sometimes credit is hiding in plain sight. Or in a Lynyrd Skynyrd song everyone in the country has heard between five and 500 times:
Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers
And they’ve been known to pick a song or two
Lord they get me off so much
They pick me up when I’m feeling blue
Now how about you?
“The Swampers” is another name for the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, a handful of session musicians who provided the backbone for a string of huge hits in the 60’s and 70’s. Whether you’ve heard of the Swampers or not, Muscle Shoals, the new documentary about their work, the town they hail from and the producer/studio owner who gave them an opportunity to record with some of music’s most legendary artists, is an absolute must-see.
Exactly one year ago, Vampire Weekend donned some pretty sinister face paint and performed “Unbelievers” on Jimmy Kimmel Live!‘s Halloween show. If memory serves, these were the first notes I heard of what would become Modern Vampires of the City. It’s crazy looking back on that now. For me, MVOTC is one of those special cases where you listen to an album so many times you damn-near internalize it, and then it becomes surreal to think about how, at one point not so long ago, it didn’t exist at all.
In August, I found out about this Buzzfeed list of “27 Breathtaking Record Stores You Have To Shop At Before You Die” from a tweet posted by the proprietor of one of my favorite music blogs, AnEarful. At that point, I’d been to two of them — Mississippi Records in Portland, OR and Grimey’s in Nashville — which, as I confessed at the time, made me feel like some sort of low-grade jet setter. Really, what it makes me is the kind of person who, when exploring a city for the first time, disappears for a few hours to feed a habit that’s already overfed back home. (Quick plug: I can think of a few Richmond shops that deserve to be on the sequel to that Buzzfeed list, if’n one’s ever assembled…)
I knew about Reckless Records before that list came out — I’ve gotten my brother-in-law a Reckless gift certificate or two in years past via the interweb — but reading about the store on that list gave me the nudge I needed to make seeing it firsthand a priority, and I got the opportunity to check out the Milwaukee Ave. location last weekend, when Mrs. YHT and I were in town for a wedding.
Around 11 p.m. Central Time on Thursday night, Mrs. YHT and I landed in Chicago and were promptly picked up by my sister, who you might remember from this post about her Beatles fandom, and her husband, who you might remember from this post about his band, Czar. When I woke up the next morning, my head propped up by two pillows and the world’s most comfortable air mattress, I spent some time ogling their record collection, which was just a few inches away from my face.
And then I got jealous.
Listed below are the five records I really, really wanted to steal.
So as it turns out, trying to encapsulate my Fall Line Fest experience in a single post is preventing me from writing anything at all about it. That’s no fun. I want to share a bunch of pictures, I have a great video of No BS! Brass Band covering “Thriller,” there’s a cat story… it’s just too much to cram into a single serving. So I’m heeding the advice issued in The White Stripes’ “Little Acorns” and taking things one at a time.
My very first Fall Line Fest experience came via Kopecky Family Band, the Camel’s Friday night closer. I made it to the Camel just as the preceding act was tearing down — right on schedule, to everyone involved’s credit — which gave me the opportunity to watch the venue’s stage side clear, start to fill in again, and eventually become crowded with gold-wristband-wearing, excited, eager-to-sing-along supporters whose enthusiasm was rewarded handsomely.
While the highs of the show were certainly high (I’m speaking literally here — as you can see from the picture above, certain members of the band would climb things at particularly elevated moments), the quietest moments are the ones that have stuck with me most.
You Hear That 