Payday usually brings a chance to do a little shopping, and yesterday was no exception. We hit the bins at Plan 9 Music and turned up a good bit of interesting stuff. Kelly found a couple of new things--the Hives, Richard Shindell--while I indulged my nostalgia by poking through the used CDs and turning up a bunch of retro stuff: Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell (the first one--I couldn't call myself a respectable Rocky Horror fan without it...), Billy Joel's Turnstiles (his last album before becoming a megastar), and the soundtrack from Wonder Boys, which features Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, Buffalo Springfield, John Lennon and other rock veterans.

Perhaps most intriguing, I found a collection from Fox's TV Show called That 70s Album (Rockin'). It's got a number of odd little tunes that I wouldn't have sought out on other albums, but when put together made for a compelling mix: Argent's "Hold Your Head Up" (one of my favorite songs from childhood), Golden Earring's "Radar Love," BTO's "Let It Ride," the Kinks' "Celluloid Heroes," even the original studio version of Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me," which is a wambly little pimple on the backside of the mighty live version from Budokan.

But somehow having found things I want always reminds me of the things I haven't been able to find, some of which may not even exist:

Rupert Hine's Waving Not Drowning album. I don't think this one has ever been released on CD, nor do I expect it to be. I'm at the point now where I'd settle for an LP just so I could own two brilliant pieces of proto-electronica: "One Man's Poison" and "Eleven Faces," both of which sound like analog versions of Nine Inch Nails. Melodic, dark & creepy--I want it.

Ralph Wiley's Dark Witness Wiley is a fascinating writer, whether the subject is race relations, sports, or literature, and I own two of his books (Why Black People Tend to Shout and What Black People Should Do Now), but I don't own the one that got me interested in him in the first place, the one which contains his marvelous essay on why Mark Twain is America's greatest writer. Can't find it, either--out of print, not at E-bay, not nowhere nohow.

the black girls EP Now THIS jones is likely to go permanently unfulfilled. The black girls were a Chapel Hill band from the mid-80s, a trio of piano, guitar & violin. Their first self-released EP contained only five songs, but two of them were just bloody wonderful--the jerky, jiggy "Devil''s Garden" and the languid, unsettling "Queen Anne." They later changed their name to the one-word blackgirls and released a couple more records, but the first one's the one I want. And if you think it's easy to find, imagine for a moment what you get when you run a Google search for "black girls."

We're living in a material world, so if any of you material guys or gals have a line on any of the above, let me know...
9:03 AM

.................................

There's not much to say about him tonight. He never said much about himself anyway. The other three talked enough that it was probably hard to get a word in edgewise. But he held the whole thing together--an anchor, as some said, to keep the group from flying apart. And then Moon found a way to fly off anyhow.

But tonight I'm just thinking about the sounds. There's a moment on Quadrophenia where everything good about rock music is outlined in fire--the first two seconds of "The Real Me," right after Daltrey has closed off "I Am the Sea" by shouting "Can you?" and right on top of Moon's cymbal-crashing entrance. Townshend hits a C-major chord twice. And over it you hear the notes, four of them, from the bass. His fingers were leaping down the neck, churning, plowing up the soil of the song to let the shoots come through, breaking through the ice and the tension. It's more than power--it's grace, agility, precision. It's like watching a plowhorse run the Kentucky Derby and win. He drives that song along for another three minutes and it's breathtaking. Nothing had ever sounded like that before, and nothing will again.

Rest easy, John. You've earned it.
8:25 PM

.................................