Ramblin' with Roger

My favorite albums from 1961-1970: 150-126

I couldn’t stop with 100, so I went to 150, and I’ll go through them 25 at a time. I won’t post every day, but it’ll be every three or four days.

SamuraiFrog has ” been doing a massive project for the past couple of years: listening to all of the music I ever wanted to listen to, in chronological order… I thought I’d jump back into the sixties and make a big list of favorites… So, in my journey through the 1960s, here are my 100 favorites of the many, many albums I listened to, 20 a day for the rest of the week.”

He wrote about them HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE.

“A couple of ground rules, though:

“First, I count in units of 10, so the years active here are 1961-1970.”
Well, OK. Must say, though, that most of the albums I listed for 1970 I played in college, while the ones from 1969 and earlier were from high school, so it represents a sea change in perspective, though there was some carryover.

“Second, no greatest hits albums or compilations. I always feel like that’s cheating to have them on the same list as proper albums because compilations are the cherry-picked best.”

True, though most of my albums early on WERE the greatest hits. Herman’s Hermits, much of my early Motown, Donovan, and especially Sly and the Family Stone.

“Third, I apologize if this list isn’t really that different from the myriad of greatest album lists already in existence.

“Fourth, as always, I reserve the right to cheat my rules because they’re my rules.”

In deference to the originator, I will play by most of these rules. That said, I did NOT engage in a massive listening. I took a couple of greatest albums of the period lists, added some top sellers lists, and augmented with my rapidly fading memory to come up with the raw list from which to pare down. The chances I’m forgetting SOMETHING is very high. Also, some of the dates have come from secondary sources, so if they are wrong, you can tell me and I will correct them.

Also, I couldn’t stop with 100, so I went to 150, and I’ll go through them 25 at a time. I won’t post every day, but it’ll be every three or four days.

150. Blind Faith: Blind Faith (1969)
That group with 2/3s of Cream, Steve Winwood, and a guy I hadn’t hear of.

149. Neil Young: Neil Young (1968)

148. Judy Collins: Whales & Nightingales (1970)

147. Jefferson Airplane: Crown Of Creation (1968)

146. Iron Butterfly: In A Gadda Da Vida (1968)
What else was even ON that album?

145. Rolling Stones: Beggar’s Banquet (1968)

144. Diana Ross: Diana Ross (1970)
Her first solo album, with ‘Reach Out And Touch’, and ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’.

143. The Byrds: Sweetheart of the Rodeo (1968)
Came to this album this century.

142. Silver Apples: Silver Apples (1968)
A “psychedelic electronic music duo”. Got the LP in the 1980s. “Oscillations, oscillations. Electronic evocations of sound’s reality.” Opening lyrics to the single from the album.

141. Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
I found it revolutionary at the time, and much imitated (often badly), but, to me, it feels its age. Still I listened to it a lot. And my friends in high school referred to themselves as Holiday Unlimited. Our motto came from ‘Mr. Kite’ – “A splendid time is guaranteed for all.”

140. Beach Boys: Wild Honey (1968)

139. Jimi Hendrix: Axis: Bold As Love (1967)
I think I bought this album twice, by mistake.

138. Temptations: Cloud Nine (1969)
The first side was the first iteration of psychedelic soul on Motown, with songs written by the late Norman Whitfield with Barrett Strong, and produced by Whitfield.

137. Rolling Stones: Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967)

136. King Crimson: In the Wake of Poseidon (1970)

135. Jeff Beck Group: Truth (1968)

134. The Band: Stage Fright (1970)
The third album, which I played a lot in my dorm room freshman year in college.

133. Rascals: Once Upon a Dream (1968)
I was a sucker for the Rascals, even when they got a bit – weird.

132. Three Dog Night: It Ain’t Easy (1970)

131. Diana Ross and the Supremes and Temptations: Join (1968)
‘Try It Baby’, a cover of a Marvin Gaye song, is my favorite.

130. Cream: Wheels Of Fire (1968)

129. Jimi Hendrix: Band of Gypsys (1970)
Buddy Miles’ ‘Them Changes’ featured here.

128. Blood, Sweat, and Tears: 3 (1970)

127. Diana Ross and the Supremes: Reflections (1968)
There is this Motown compilation I have on LP, and I think it was Mary Wilson who said, in the intro, that the title tune, is a “weird, weird song.”

126. Stephen Stills: Stephen Stills (1970)
Stills could be rather preachy, but I was OK with that at the time.

Disappearing text, and pictures in blogs

I may be a technophobe, but necessity can be a real mother.

wordpress-logo — My text can go here. Yahoo! This is so easy.

This is in response, not so much to a question, but to a comment. Chris said, in response to this post, “That ‘highlight the text to avoid an accidental spoiler’ is absolutely brilliant.”

How did I do that? Well, some years ago, I saw it done on someone’s blog (Mike Sterling? Greg Burgas? I don’t remember) and asked, “How do you do that?”

If I cut and pasted the code, then you wouldn’t see it because it would be invisible. So I’m going to write it out descriptively; you’d type the symbols indicated with no gaps.

The left arrow (comma uppercase)
The words span style
The equal sign
Back slash
Quotes
The word color:#ffff
Semicolon
Back slash
Quotes
Right arrow (period uppercase)
Whatever text you want to hide
Left arrow
Back slash
The word span
Right arrow
(And if this is unclear, send your e-mail to rogerogreen (AT) gmail (DOT) com, and I’ll send it to you.)

(UPDATE: as Jaquandor indicated, the ffff only works if your background is white. If your background is another color, you need to pick THAT color; check here, for instance.)

While I’m in this geek mood – it won’t last, believe me – let me talk about photos on this blog. On my original Blogger blog, it took me a while to figure out how to add graphics to my Blogger blog, but eventually, pretty much by accident, I did. When I started with my Times Union blog in 2008, on WordPress, I couldn’t figure out how to put in pictures. More correctly, I couldn’t SIZE the picture. I tried to put in a picture of Dudley Do-Right – former NYS governor Eliot Spitzer looked VERY MUCH like the cartoon character – but it was SO huge, it took up the entire screen. So I continued to compose in Blogger, then pasted it into the TU WP. Then when I got this blog in WP in 2010, I stayed drafting it all in Blogger.

Then recently, my Blogger interface changed so that I couldn’t insert the pictures the way I wanted to. They’d sit on the top of the page – see this post, e.g., and it just wasn’t what I wanted.

I decided to look at WP again, and in the last six years, they made it easier. Not only that but now I can put CAPTIONS in the pictures. Sizing is also more instinctive than it used to be. At the same time, I learned how to post an MP3 file of music successfully onto this blog; I had tried as recently as a year ago, without success.

I may be a technophobe, but necessity can be a real mother.

Speaking of Blogger: Prevent Blogger Blog from Redirecting to a country-specific domain. “The main reason behind the redirection is the selective censorship so that they can easily block a blog or selected pages on a blog in one country while serving the content to other countries… Reports suggest that your blog SEO will be affected which is bad for your blog health.”

I see this in e-mails, and elsewhere: someone is citing a specific webpage from some RSS feed. It’ll look like http://mindhuntersinc.com/doing-what-we-can/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=doing-what-we-can – but it can generally be cut down at the ? – try it and you’ll find that http://mindhuntersinc.com/doing-what-we-can/ works just as well.

The Lydster, Part 109: E-mail

Thought I would ask y’all your opinion on this issue: when did your kids get their own e-mails?

The Daughter, who is nine, wants an e-mail account. Why? Because her friends have them. Often, when I am trying to decide what is appropriate for her, I try to remember what it was I was allowed to do when I was a child. Lessee, I got my first e-mail account when I was…forty. OK, that’s not helpful.

I asked my friends with children. They let their kids have e-mail anywhere from eight and eleven, but they knew they would have no expectation of privacy. The kids ask but tend to not even use them that often; some would rather text, which my daughter does not currently have access to.

I am inclined to say yes – it would not cost us any money – but The Wife was resistant. She suggested that The Daughter could use The Wife’s e-mail; I think that is a TERRIBLE idea. My bride has hundreds of unread e-mails at any given time. How would either of them find the items of her own? I suspect this whole exploration is that good and natural desire for her to become her own person. That said, I’m willing to monitor her e-mails, probably just to her schoolmates and relatives.

Thought I would ask y’all your opinion on this issue: when did your kids get their own e-mails?
***
In other news, she still misses us. She had two child watchers in two evenings last week, and she said she was fine with it, both before and after the fact. But when we asked if we could get another child watcher this week so we could use the symphony tickets we were given, she said “No, it’s too soon.” So Papa will stay home and let Mama and her friend use the tickets.

Flashback to footwear

While we were in Portland, Maine, we stopped at Freeport at the L.L. Bean store.

I’ve been occasionally complaining about the quality of the customer service of certain businesses. So I thought I’d share a more positive story.

But first a bit of personal history. I was on the game show JEOPARDY! on November 9 and 10, 1998, which was recorded on September 16 of that year. I’ve quickly noted that I won $17,600 in the first game. I was less effusive about my second game. I was in a distant third place going into the last question. I had $2,200, Jim had $5,500, and Robin, $9,200.

The Final JEOPARDY! category was FAMOUS NEW ENGLANDERS: The clue was just a picture of a guy dressed rather like the guy here. I wagered $1,800 and got it right (LL Bean) ending with $4,000. Jim bet $3,800 and got it wrong, and finished with $1,700. Robin bet $2,500, which was incorrect but won the game with $6,700 in cash. Both of them gave Sears as the answer. Jim won a Panasonic DVD player; and I, a trip to Almond Beach Resort, Barbados, which Carol and I used on our honeymoon in May 1999.

In March 1999, my then-fiancee, Carol, took me to Portland, Maine on vacation. While we were there, we stopped at Freeport, ME at the L.L. Bean store; they weren’t all over the place as they are now. In the entryway was the exact same photo I had seen while taping the game show about six months earlier. We got snowed in at Portland and had to stay a couple of extra days.

In March 2013, I was wearing a pair of LL Bean boots when the sole separated from the rest of the shoe. My wife took them to the local LL Bean store – which did not exist in 1999 – who sent them to the repair unit.

The repair unit, though, could not fix them. But they would give me a credit for what I paid for them, as part of some lifetime guarantee I was only vaguely aware of. When did I buy them? I had no idea. “Had to be 1998 or 1999.” Well, in that case, it HAD to be March of 1999 [though I didn’t actually remember buying them, since I had not yet received the $17,600; the check arrived on March 17, 1999]. I explained that I had to make a pilgrimage to the store because it got me a trip to a far-away island. The repair guy loved the story.

A Boston marathon of random thoughts

I made the most unfortunate error of listening to the news all afternoon on Friday, April 19.

* I have been to Boston several times in my life, though not in the past five years. I had an ex whose family lived near there. I loved the mass transit in the region.

* My very good friend Karen used to live in Somerville, which is just north of Cambridge, part of the area where a lot of the activity on Friday took place. Her sister, who I have known for decades, still lives in that section, and I was wondering how much she had directly affected by the shutdown.

* I won $17,600 on JEOPARDY! in Boston in 1998, with friends Karen and Judy, and Judy’s son Max in the audience.

* Some talking head wondered if the bombing in Boston would make Americans more sensitive to the ravages of war that take place in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere. My guess is no.

* A lot of bad info from CNN, who had reported a bomber had been captured on April 17, then awkwardly walked back its own story on-air later that afternoon.

* Amy’s poem Boston Meltdown reminded me why I stopped watching ABC News; it was the cult of personality – “Diane Sawyer’s my friend!” – which rankles me.

* Some news analyst referred to the M.I.T. cop who was shot and killed as the Officer Tippit of this case; I remembered who that was, amazingly. He was the police officer shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald after the JFK assassination. That’s rather arcane stuff, but when you’re filling the news cycle 24/7, that’s what you’ll get.

* Tried very hard not to listen to all the speculation about the identity and motivation of the bombers before they were identified, and assiduously avoided other people’s blather on the topic.

* Tegan is quite right that crowdsourcing looking for the bombs and bombers can be a dangerous trap.

* As terrifying and awful as the Marathon bombing was on Monday, April 15, the shootout, manhunt, and capture on April 19 was tenser in that one knew what COULD happen with the remaining suspect. My daughter in particular was tense over the fact that the Watertown neighborhood looked like a war setting.

* I made the most unfortunate error of listening to the news all afternoon on Friday, April 19. Tried listening to NBC but it kept reloading on my computer. Listened to four hours of CNN, expecting the door-to-door search would surely glean the suspect. No go. Then CNN timed out on my computer. Paying attention gave me a terrible headache.

* Yet then listened to CBS News when the announcement that the suspect was not captured but that the lockdown was over (wha!), but had gone to dinner when the capture of the alleged second bomber took place.

*Still, there were two interesting threads in the interviews of the suspects’ families. Their uncle in Maryland, who called the young men “punks,” wore the ethnic badge of shame, that their alleged actions brought shame to the Chechen people, that was very much like all of South Korea seemed to feel after it was revealed that the Virginia Tech shooter was from there. I’d forgotten that the VT massacre (32 dead, 17 wounded) was this time of the month (April 16, 2007).

* The mother and father, back in the former USSR, and the aunt in Canada, conversely, seemed to think the younger son was incapable of such heinous actions. The aunt, who is a lawyer, was particularly fond of the theory that her nephews were framed. One CNN reporter suggested the mother was “deluded”; a mother not believing her son was a killer seems understandable. The classmates of the younger suspect, who survived the shootouts, expressed great surprise as well.

* Even before this, I had pretty much decided that I wasn’t a big fan of large crowds such as New Orleans at Mardi Gras and Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

* Must admit this made me laugh.

* Mark Evanier tweeted: “America’s currently debating whether a guy who can’t talk should have been informed that he has the right to remain silent.” Of course, the issue isn’t just about one hated individual, but whether a naturalized US citizen can be considered an enemy combatant, and thus not subject to his Miranda rights. It’s good that he’ll be tried in civilian court.

* The family went to see West Side Story at Albany High School Sunday afternoon. It was quite good, especially the young woman playing Anita. I wonder, though, if the decision to have a sign on the front window, which said they would be taking extra precautions as a “result of Boston and other recent events,” was a function of the violence in the musical. Everyone was wanded.

* The lectionary scripture for this past Sunday included the 23rd Psalm. the choir sang The Lord Is My Shepherd from the Rutter Requiem [LISTEN], which I love.

* In the sermon, the pastor noted she had scrapped what she was thinking about in terms of her sermon after Monday afternoon. She noted that times were also difficult when Psalm 23 was written: “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”

* Cheri collected some sporting events videos from this past week appropriate to the topic.

*I happened to have had the eponymous Boston album in my desk at work, even before the events, reason enough to LISTEN to it.
***
Allan Arbus, best known for his dozen appearances as the sarcastic psychiatrist Maj. Sidney Freedman on the TV series MASH died at the age of 95. Here are three minutes of Sidney’s best quips. Read what Ken Levine, who wrote for Arbus on MASH, has to say.
***
Richie Haven was only 72 when he died on Earth Day. He was forced to become the opening act at the Woodstock concert in 1969 because no one else could get there and ended up playing three hours, covering every song he knew. Here’s a story by Albert Brooks about being the opening act for Richie; NSFW.