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A LiveJournal meme I picked up from Bob Mike: Turn on your music randomizer of choice (iPod, WinAmp, CD jukebox), set it to shuffle play, then list the first twenty songs it plays.  You can post your response on the discussion page, or post a link to your personal corner of the web if you want to put it there.  I made a vow to not edit the list, regardless of how unflattering it might be :-).  Here it is.

1. The Colour of Memory, “Into My Own”    (from The Old Man and the Sea)
2. Massive Attack, “Teardrop”    (from Mezzanine)
3. Black Sabbath, “Hand of Doom”    (from Paranoid)
4. Silverchair, “Abuse Me”    (from Freak Show)
5. Mudhoney, “Night of the Hunted”    (from Tomorrow Hit Today)
6. Metallica, “St. Anger”    (from St. Anger)
7. Candlebox, “Butterfly (reprise)”    (from Lucy)
8. Tool, “Forty Six & 2″    (from Ænemia)
9. Days of the New, “Bring Yourself”    (from Days of the New 2)
10. Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes, “Hey Hey What Can I Do”    (from Live at the Greek)
11. Garbage, “Vow”    (from Garbage)
12. A Perfect Circle, “Breña”    (from Mer de Noms)
13. Fugazi, “Strangelight”    (from The Argument)
14. Jeremy Toback, “Unbecome”    (from Perfect Flux Thing)
15. The Kronos Quartet, “Pannonia Boundless”    (from Caravan)
16. The Young Dubliners, “Don’t You Worry”    (from Breathe)
17. Enya, “Smaointe…”    (from Shepherd Moons)
18. Page & Plant, “Heart in your Hand”    (from Walking into Clarkesdale)
19. Led Zeppelin, “You Shook Me”    (from Led Zeppelin)
20. Queensrÿche, “The Lady Wore Black”    (from Queensrÿche)

I’ve been listening to and enjoying KROQ Los Angeles’s “Rock of the 90s” weekend.  There’s a lot of reminiscing.  I’m one of the few people whose entire junior high, high school, and four-years-of-bachelor’s-degree-pursuing all took place in the 1990s (do the math if you’re so inclined — it’s hard to pull off.)

It’s a varied lot.  There have been acts and tracks that the intervening years have turned into classics — Pearl Jam and Nirvana.  There are bands the entire existence of which I’d forgotten — Sponge, King Missile, Dinosaur Jr., The Chemical Brothers.  There are songs that I’m pleased to say I liked when they came out and I found to have aged well — songs by Cowboy Junkies and The Prodigy, for instance — and songs that haven’t aged well at all — Green Day, Stone Temple Pilots (yes, as much as I fondly remember “Wicked Garden”, it sounds really tired.)  There are a few tracks I disliked at their release that I find more impressive now: Marilyn Manson’s “Beautiful People” sounds downright innovative when you consider the hordes of his clones that now clutter the scenes.  There are songs that I would have sworn predated the 90s but turn out to have just sneaked in (Jane’s Addiction, Depeche Mode) and ones I would have sworm postdated them (Incubus, Limp Bizkit).  There’s a lot of stuff I hadn’t heard since high school, a lot of memories.

I’ve also unfortunately been listening to the D.J. — Nicole Alvarez, I think her name is — whom I had never heard before.  She’s not very good.  She might be egosurfing and find this, in which case I’m a bit sorry, but really, she’s not very good.  She went off at one point about the drink absinthe, for instance, and made several errors in her soliloquy, claiming, for instance, that it was legal and that it had to be cooked before consumption.  She also claimed that it caused severe hallucinations and made one shoot one’s gun at “things that aren’t there”.  So I called the radio station.  I’ve never been treated nicely by KROQ when I’ve called — I’ve only done so a couple of times and haven’t done so in years — but I figured “what the hell”, right?  What’s the worst they could do?  Swear at me and hang up on me, I suppose.  I’m a big boy, and I’ve got nothing to prove to a radio station, and Miss Alvarez might appreciate my help.

I called, and the call went through.  Straight to Miss Alvarez.  And then something odd happened, something else that hasn’t happened since high school.  I asked if she would like to know more about absinthe, and she got a very false, very pretentious air, and said — I am not exaggerating — “No, I know all about absinthe, but there’s only so much time, you know.  But it’s good to know that there are other people well-educated about it.”  I was stunned for a split second.  What’s there to say?  I was tempted to respond, “Well, you made a couple of mistakes, would you like to know what they were?”  But I didn’t, I just said “OK, very good.”  After warning me to “stay away from it”, she thanked me and hung up.  Weird, eh?  This presumably adult woman tried to con me.  A complete stranger.  Over the telephone.  When she obviously didn’t know much about the topic.  I’m having trouble guessing what she thinks she had to prove to me.  I don’t think anyone has tried to do this to me since I was 15.  But the experience put a smile on my face for the rest of the drive home, and gave me a good story for mcgees.org, so I suppose it was well worth it.

Composer Michael Kamen has died.

It just ocurred to me, completely out of the blue and in a silent office, that the title of the musical Rent has a double meaning: the fee to occupy a space, yes, but also “torn apart”, a commentary on the anguish and unsettledness of the characters.  It’s been years since I’ve seen this play and a long time since I’ve heard anything from it, so I have no idea why this popped into my head.  I went to Google and searched for the text, and found that this is obvious, I had just completely missed it:

How do you leave the past behind

When it keeps finding ways to get to your heart

It reaches way down deep and tears you inside out

Till you’re torn apart

Rent

They tell us there are only two sides to be on

If you are on our side you’re right if not you’re wrong

But are we innocent, paragons of good?

Is our guilt erased by the pain that we’ve endured?

Hey look it’s time to pledge allegiance

Oh god I love my dirty Uncle Sam

Our country’s marching to the beat now

And we must learn to step in time

Where is the questioning where is the protest song?

Since when is skepticism un-American?

Dissent’s not treason but they talk like it’s the same

Those who disagree are afraid to show their face

Let’s break out our old machines now

It sure is good to see them run again

Oh gentlemen start your engines

And we know where we get the oil from

Are you feeling alright now

Paint myself all red white blue

Are you singing let’s fight now

Innocent people die, uh oh

There are reasons to unite

Is this why we unite?

If you hate this time

Remember we are the time!

Show you love your country go out and spend some cash

Red white blue hot pants doing it for Uncle Sam

Flex our muscles show them we’re stronger than the rest

Raise your hands up baby are you sure that we’re the best?

We’ll come out with our fists raised

The good old boys are back on top again

And if we let them lead us blindly

The past becomes the future once again

                    – Sleater-Kinney, Combat Rock, from the album One Beat

The final setlist for Pearl Jam’s 12 November release “Riot Act”, courtesy of The [Official] Pearl Jam Rumor Pit.

1. Can’t Keep
2. Save You
3. Love Boat Captain
4. Cropduster
5. Ghost
6. I Am Mine
7. Thumbing My  Way
8. You Are
9. Get Right
10. Green Disease
11. helphelp
12. Bushleaguer
13. 1/2 Full
14. Arc
15. All or None

With less than two months to go, I am as always getting into my pre-release hyperventilation stage.  15 songs!  I hope that some are longer format and not of their recent sub-three minute pattern.

Apparently the single “I Am Mine” is allowed to be played officially tomorrow, 18 September.  The only problem with their traditional pre-release singles is that I listen to them so much that they never quite seem to fit into the album once released, as they have built an identy all their own.  It happened with “Who You Are”, it happened to “Given to Fly”, it happened, to a certain degree, to “Nothing As It Seems”.  Regarding “Given To Fly”, I am surprised when the song comes on every time I listen to Yield, which I admit is bizarre.

I am intrigued by the phenomenon of songs edited for broadcast, especially by the inconsistent application of rules.  My examples might best be addressed in a bulleted form:

• Everlast’s What It’s Like discusses at one point the abuse leveled by protesters at a young woman seeking an abortion.  In the line “They call her a killer, they call her a sinner, and they call her a whore,” (only) the word “whore” is deleted.
• A fascinating example for me is Disturbed’s Voices.  In the following passage the italicized words are deleted on MTV X:
  

  Wake up, are you alive?

  Will you listen to me?

  I’m gonna talk about some freaky shit now

  Someone is gonna die

  When you listen to me

  Let the living die, Let the living die

  Yes, only the one “die” is omitted.  I figure that that particular omission is post-Columbine paranoia: “Someone is going to die when they listen to him?  Isn’t he encouraging school shootings?”  The reasoning is sketchy but perhaps tenable.  So why in the world would they allow the following to remain in the song?

  Can’t you imagine how good going through this will make you feel

  I promise, no one will ever know

  There will be no chance of you getting caught

  They never loved you anyway

  So come on, be a man

  And do what you are compelled to do

• This is one that has annoyed me for a long time.  There is a fantastic Candlebox song entitled You that discusses the lyricist’s sadness at the effect of drugs on the world around him.  In the following passage, radio stations play a version that completely omits the section in bold.  This, in my opinion, ruins the point of the entire song:
  

  Come around town

  Steal another dime

  Take another line

  Won’t you feel it blanket your soul

  Out of mind

  Come around town

  Steal another dime

  Do another crime

  Won’t you get it higher and higher

  
  Roll through time

  Come around town

  Steal another dime

  Don’t you push your drugs in my face

  Yes, I’m feeling

  Feeling fine

  Don’t you push your drugs in my face

  Or I’m gonna put you in your place

  Fuck you

  
  I don’t want it no more

  And it’s mine

  Said this pain in my heart is all mine

  Yes, it’s mine all alone

• There is the phenomenon of not deleting lyrics that the censors don’t hear (or expect the audience not to understand.)  Predictably, this has happened more than once with Pearl Jam.  Yes, in Jeremy Ed clearly says “Seemed a harmless little fuck,” and this is duly deleted.  But less-than-perfectly-clear expletives in other songs remain intact: Given To Fly’s “But first he was stripped, and then he was stabbed by faceless men / Well fuckers, he still stands” remains in the broadcast version; Once, discussing how a mother’s abuse has turned her child into a serial killer and rapist, retains the lyric “You think I’ve got my eyes closed but I’ve been looking at you the whole fucking time”; and Not For You keeps “This is not for you. (x3) / Oh, never was for you / Fuck you / This is not for you”
• One of the most interesting is the following.  Kid Rock in Batwitdaba, obviously talking about heroin use, says “And it don’t even matter if your veins are punctured.”  Godsmack in Voodoo, obviously talking about heroin use, say “I’m not the one who’s so far away / When I feel the snakebite enter my veins.”  Godsmack keep their drug reference, Kid Rock loses his.
• When radio stations first began playing Alanis Morissette’s You Oughta Know, they deleted the predictable word in “Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?”  Only after the song had been on for six months or so did I hear them also deleting “go down on you” in “Would she go down on you in a theater?”

Are these choices the prerogative of the record companies or are they explicitly enforced through FCC regulations?  I do not know; please write me if you do.

I visited the guitar again and copied down its vitals.  It is an Epiphone Les Paul Custom, ebony finish, gold hardware.  You can see a picture here.  I love this guitar.

Saturday evening I visited Instrumental Music here in Thousand Oaks to pick up a new set of guitar strings.  After I picked them out, Jenn was very patient and waited while I played around like a kid in a toyshop.  My gaze had fixed on a gorgeous black Les Paul, and I pulled it down and plugged it in.  When I first started picking through a chord I heard one of the worst mis-tunings I have ever encountered, made worse by the (intentional) distortion on the amp.  I’m going to see if I can give this explanation in a few sentences rather than my normal multi-paragraphs.  A guitar, as you may know, is usually tuned E-A-D-G-B-E, low to high.  This means that on a tempered scale the dashes in the previous list represent 5, 5, 5, 4, and 5 half steps, respectively.  Someone, presumably a beginner shopping at the store, had tuned the guitar with 5, 5, 5, 5, and 5 half steps, leaving the final tuning E-A-D-G-C-F.  This makes an E Major-shaped chord resolve as E-B-E-G#-C-F, giving us E-F dissonance (twice) as well as B-C dissonance, and generating what is surely one of the most revolting sounds known to man.  After I fixed the tuning it out sounded great.

I’m still thinking about it; this guitar is a beauty.  It lists for $1K, the shop carried it for $800, and I am now waiting on Guitar Center’s next “blowout sale”.  If I can get the price under $500 I can probably rationalize the purchase (Jenn, who will eventually read this post, might not agree that $500 is rationalizable.)

I have been surfing around reading more about these guitars, including a return visit to the indispensable Pearl Jam Rumor Pit, a site that is far more than its name would suggest.  Part of its role is apparently to give patronizing and dismissive non-answers to banal questions, as well as to questions that, while not banal, seem to suggest sarcastic answers.  Thus this rather amusing exchange from 3 August 1997:

Q: What type of strings does Stone [Gossard] use on his Les Paul?

A: Metal ones

While I’m on the topic, I want to share this passage from Ed’s gear page:

Q: I’m curious about Ed’s guitar setup and was wondering if you would mind
assisting me.  It’s widely reported that Ed doesn’t use effects pedals.  How does
he switch between clean and dirty tones in songs like “Not For You” and
“Corduroy”? …

A: You are correct that Ed typically does not use guitar effect pedals … At times [he] has experimented with using various distortion pedals, but one has never stuck - either because he wasn’t happy with the distortion, or because he doesn’t want to fuss with a foot pedal by his microphone stand.  On top of that, Ed’s really interested in guitars with distortion and/or effects built on-board the guitar, such as in the vintage, Italian-made Vox guitars that he owns.  With those guitars he can turn the distortion, and/or other effects, on and off at the flip of a switch right on the guitar itself.  It’s a pretty neat concept, but whereas the Vox guitars naturally sound O.K., they don’t sound great.  So far though, Ed’s never taken one of the Vox’s out on tour with him….

So if he uses no effect pedals live, and no Vox guitars live, then how does he get his distortion??  Well, it’s actually a little bit purer approach.  First of all, most of the time Ed plays his guitars using only the front (neck) pickup.  This pickup typically has a thicker, muddier tone due to its position along the length of the string.  And so with the positioning of that pickup, it’s a little easier to “overdrive” your amp with your strumming/picking technique.  Second, Ed sets his amp tone by first dialing in a loud, clean, full tone.  (Clean being the important word there.)  He adjusts his input gain right to the point where the “clean” tone is on the verge of distorting slightly.  Once this is set, his sound (clean or dirty) is controlled purely with his hands, changing with the intensity he chooses to strum the strings with.  If he picks more delicately, he can achieve a cleaner tone.  If he picks harder and more aggressively, he can achieve a distorted tone.  Cool, huh?

Ummm … Slipknot’s self-titled debut?  Not pleasant.  It is times like this that I am thankful to be a software engineer rather than a professional music critic: I have no obligation to listen through the whole thing and find something intelligent to say.

It is hard to believe that it is after midnight now.  There just doesn’t seem to be enough time to do everything I want to do these days.  This is mostly a good thing: there are a lot of activities that interest me at the moment, so I am never at a loss for something to do and enjoy.  Here is a list of activities I have wanted to pursue in the past couple of days, only a subset of which have been accomplished or attempted.

1. Play with Cakewalk.  Use it to record some of my musical compositions, with multiple vocal and instrumental tracks.
2. Order more stamps from Iowa Stamps & Coins for my ongoing (but unnamed) philatelic art project.  Work on the art project.  Transfer the pieces to a new album.
3. Work on a redesign of mcgees.org.
4. Install the new printer that has been sitting on my floor, in a box, since the day after Christmas.
5. Play some more with the new TiVo.
6. Watch some of the movies recorded by it.
7. Listen to my new CDs from Christmas.
8. Research the sport of fencing.
9. Add advertising to ScotchFinder (the advertisers are arranged, I just need to do some re-coding of the site.)  Add the ability to search the database via a toll-free telephone number.
10. Research whale deafness.
11. Continue reading The Annotated Alice, Infinite Jest, and The Life of Samuel Johnson.
12. Research PocketPCs, potentially to buy one soon.
13. Make hotel reservations for the UK trip.
14. Search Fresh Air archives.
15. Buy add-ons to the hamster habitats.
16. Clean my study.
17. Reinstall Microsoft Visual Studio at home from my CDs, which I haven’t done since my hard drive crashed.

These are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.  (You probably think some of these are fake, thrown in for humor.  That is not the case.  Even the whale one.)  Implicitly on the list, of course, is to write about the activities in this ‘blog.

My makeshift way of dealing with the situation has been to get 5.5 hours of sleep per night.  I think this is beginning to take a toll.  It’s getting close to 12:30.  I will probably go watch half an hour of “Antiques Roadshow” on TiVo, pour a malt, maybe scoop a bit of Ben and Jerry’s (which is, by the way, now the most popular tourist attraction in Vermont.  Yikes.)

More descriptions of the activities on the list will follow, as time permits.  I have found that it is frequently easier to write about one’s experiences doing something after one has already done the something.  Wish me luck for making the time.