You know what happens to me all the damn time? I realize I need to listen to a specific song right now, and then I realize that I haven’t actually ripped that CD yet. (I’ve got a lot of CDs, and I’ve only ripped around a thousand of them.) I could, theoretically, go find the CD and actually, you know, play it… but that seems so last century.
One of the advantages of the amount of time I’ve spent locked in my office lately is that whenever one of these urges hit me, I could actually rip the disc in the background on one of the other machines while I was working.
So, here are some of the things I had moments of jonesing for over the last few weeks, which I’ve now been motivated to finally get around to digitizing.
Arlo Guthrie – Motorcycle (Significance Of The Pickle) Song – I can tell you exactly what triggered this one: my daughter telling me that she didn’t want a pickle. Sometimes that’s all it takes. You can picture the conversation:
“Do you want a pickle with the sandwich?”
“I don’t want a pickle.”
“…I just want to ride on my motor-sickle.”
“What?”
“It’s from this song.”
“What song.”
“A song about a guy on a motorcycle who doesn’t want a pickle.”
“You’re silly, Dad.”
Everyone should know this one. (This is in my collection because of a fellow named Gregory Burton Clark.)
Rob Szabo – My Young Friend – I had a moment of Waterloo music scene nostalgia the other day, so I pulled out Rob’s latest CD and spun it. During my 20s I spent a lot of time listening to Rob perform in one band or another, and I’ve kept up with his releases even from thousands of kilometres away in the intervening years. I quite like this one.
Gram Parsons & The Flying Burrito Brothers – Sin City – I don’t think I should need to explain this, but if I do let’s say it was because a couple of my online friends spent some time in Vegas recently, and got me thinking about it through the obvious logic chain.
Weezer – Say It Ain’t So – This one’s a bit weird. I saw where some of the cool kids are doing a Kitty Pryde art auction for charity, and that somehow put a different Weezer track–which references Kitty–in my head. And once I was thinking about Weezer, I was drawn inexorably to this track. Back in the day Danny would cover this, until the requests for it got so frequent (and in one case ridiculously insistent) that he wrote a whole other song about why he wouldn’t sing it. When I listen to this, I’m not hearing Weezer in my head.
Mississippi John Hurt – Got The Blues (Can’t Be Satisfied) – You might have noticed, below, that I’ve been working the OKeh collection. This is another one that’s lodged in my head.
George Clinton – Up For The Down Stroke – One reliable cure for workitis is a decent dose of Clinton “family” funk. This is from the 2004 live disc. I have been known to work 100 hour weeks powered entirely by the Clinton/Parliament/Funkadelic syndicate.
Ry Cooder – Three Chords And The Truth – I admit that I got into Cooder as a direct result of the Tragically Hip tune “The Hundredth Meridian“. I’m glad I did though. Listening to this tune again reminded me that I wanted to dig up some digital versions of Paul Robeson recordings as well–which was remarkably easy in the modern world.
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