Rockin' out

The Hip

Posted on by Patrick

A raven strains along the line of the road,
car­ry­ing a mud­dy, old skull
the wires whis­tle their approval,
off down the distance

“At the Hun­dredth Merid­i­an”, The Trag­i­cal­ly Hip

So the oth­er day I bought The Trag­i­cal­ly Hip’s “Yer Favourites” dou­ble CD. It makes me hap­py. Like my wife said once: “Of course you like the Hip. You’re a Cana­di­an boy.”

It’s a com­pi­la­tion of fan favourites. If I remem­ber cor­rect­ly, they polled a bunch of ran­dom fans about what their favourite Hip songs were. The result is this two-disc set. There are some great tunes in here, too: “New Orleans is Sink­ing”, “Lit­tle Bones”, “50 Mis­sion Cap”, and almost 40 oth­ers too.

See when it starts to fall apart, it real­ly falls apart
Like boots or hearts, oh when they start they real­ly fall apart
Fin­gers and toes, fin­gers and toes
Forty things we share
Forty one if you include the fact that we don’t care

“Boots or Hearts”

So how’s your music collection?

13 on the 13th

Posted on by Patrick

13 favourite songs from movie soundtracks.

Thursday Thirteen
Thir­teen Things about Patrick Johan­neson

  1. Primus, “Tom­my the Cat”, from the sound­track to Bill and Ted’s Bogus Jour­ney.
    This song intro­duced me to Primus, the bass-cen­tred wacko-lyrics band from El Sobrante, and I’ve nev­er had cause to look back since. It’s the sto­ry of a female cat out lookin’ for some action. When she finds Tom­my the Cat, her search is over:
    Con­tin­ue read­ing “13 on the 13th” →

So glad I found it

Posted on by Patrick

So I went to the judo club today, for a two-hour review of my blue belt and brown belt throws (at some point I’ll be grad­ing for my brown belt; I’m not sure if it’ll be this spring or next fall), and then after that I went and did some shop­ping. I bought a short-sleeve white dress shirt, which I’ll need for ref­er­ee­ing in judo (refs wear black socks, char­coal-grey pants, a white shirt, navy tie, and a navy sportcoat–very nat­ty), and then I ducked into a music store. Cruised the aisles, not look­ing for any­thing in par­tic­u­lar, just… look­ing. Browsing.

13 Engines -- Perpetual Motion MachineIn the used CDs sec­tion, my eyes lit upon it: 13 Engines’ Per­pet­u­al Motion Machine. I had the tape (I still do, some­where, though I’d be hard pressed to find it), and it’s one of the very few albums where I like every sin­gle song. There are the straight-ahead rock­ers, like “Bred in the Bone” and “Smoke and Ash­es”, and there are a fair num­ber of moody, slow­er num­bers, like “Moment of Clar­i­ty” and one of my favourites, “The Gold­en Age”:

So the Gold­en Age passed away to Silver
But that was long ago
There were swim­ming holes and the Vaudeville
They gave way to this
Bronze turned itself slow­ly into iron
And here we are today

If what you say has the grain of truth
The Age of Rust is soon…

The instru­ments are just the way I like ’em–the bass is a cen­tral part of the music, not just a back­ground rhythm engine, and the gui­tar is well-played. They can do the fuzz-out wall of sound just as well as the soft melan­choly sway of a down-tem­po tune.

(Aside: “The Gold­en Age” just start­ed play­ing on my CD chang­er’s Ran­dom. Good timing!)

Four­teen tunes, and not a one of them a miss.

Oh, and because it was in the sec­ond-hand shelf, and prob­a­bly had been there a while (it’s an album from 1993), the price was right: $4.99 plus taxes.

Ah, smi­ley times…

Will wonders never cease?

Posted on by Patrick

My world is falling apart. All the sup­ports and struc­tures that make up my world­view are shift­ing, slid­ing, col­laps­ing. Lis­ten: I have found a coun­try album that I may buy.

Now, to be fair, the band is Corb Lund and the Hurtin’ Alber­tans. Nev­er heard of ’em? Well, Corb was the bassist for the smalls, back in the day. Nev­er heard of the smalls? Well, I can’t help you, then.

Actu­al­ly, I can. the smalls were a band out of Alber­ta, a rock-and-roll indie group, known in the press as “Canada’s Hard­est Work­ing Inde­pen­dent Band”. I found them late in their career, at the tail end of a decade plus of tour­ing. They rocked my socks at Minnedosa, and then I caught them in Sassy’s (a for­mer strip joint) for the Bran­don show of their “Good­bye For­ev­er” tour. I have two or of their CDs, 1992’s To Each A Zone and 1995’s Waste + Tragedy, and would love to find their last release, My Dear Lit­tle Angle.

A few of the tunes on Waste + Tragedy are some­what coun­try-tinged, in con­tent if not in sound. “Pity the Man with the Fast Right Hand”, which I’m lis­ten­ing to right now, has lyrics like, for instance,

Pity the man with the fast right hand
In a drunk and a def­i­nite way
He was a hard, cold fight­er with the goods to please the writers
Till a woman came to put him away 

I mean, what’s more coun­try than that? Of course, it comes with a dri­ving bassline owing more to funk than to Way­lon Jen­nings, but the sto­ry’s a coun­try bal­lad, a tragedy of gun­smoke and glove-leather.

So the Corb Lund band, well, it’s not a huge step. Plus I can tell myself it’s “roots” music to make myself feel bet­ter about want­i­ng to buy a coun­try album. Which won’t stop my wife from laugh­ing at me. (Well, it has­n’t stopped her so far, anyways.)

Cana­di­ans may have seen the video for The Truck Got Stuck on CMT; I know I did, a cou­ple of times. Then CBC played anoth­er tune from the same album, Always Keep an Edge on Your Knife, Son. So. I think I’m in.

But I’m still not buy­ing Garth Brooks, let me tell you.