First there was Gustav Holtz composing music about the solar system, then there was Harry Revel. Released in early ’56, Music From Out of Space was the first album by record producer and TV/film composer Stu Phillips.
In his memoir, Stu Who? Forty Years of Navigating the Minefields of the Music Business, Phillips explains the recording session was financed by his father, who “was never to see that money back.”
Without the pandemic I’m certain that Trump, for all of his incompetence and dishonesty, would have nonetheless been reelected in 2020. Covid may have been the cause, but the fact is that Trump left office with the economy in shambles.
Biden shouldn’t have added another economic stimulus while the supply chains were still tangled up. The result was inflation, but interest rates needed to be brought back up to a reasonable level anyway. The commercial real estate market is suffering from a combination of remote work and years of borrowing money for free, following the financial crisis of 2008.
If Trump wins the election next week, he’ll inherit an economy that’s once again in good shape overall, as it was when he took over from Obama. That doesn’t mean there aren’t middle class families that are struggling. There always are, even without a recession. Something I’ve noticed in many stories about the economy is they often feature a single mother, as this one does.
While driving with good, ol’ Denro this past weekend to see Joe Sinnott’s family at the Albany Comic Con, we noticed a lot of highway construction. There are overpasses under construction at a Mass Pike interchange, and we rode on plenty of new pavement along the way. If Trump wins, he’ll also inherit the benefits of Biden’s Build Back Better legislation. Trump kept talking about an infrastructure bill, but he never delivered one. Maybe he had concepts of a plan.
On Biden’s watch, the government has launched large programs to move the country to clean energy sources, to create from scratch or to bring onshore a number of industries, to strengthen organized labor, to build thousands of infrastructure projects, to embed racial-equity goals in many government programs, and to break up concentrations of economic power.
Remembering Mike O’Neal on his birthday.
The Big Sleep this ain’t. It’s the Firesign Theatre’s gleefully twisted parody of the hard-boiled detective genre, “Nick Danger, Third Eye”.
Andrew at Parlogram Auctions has an appreciation of one of my all-time favorite albums, the absolutely superb Odessey and Oracle by the Zombies.
Here’s the album in all its creative perfection.
If you look carefully at record labels, many have the letters BMI.
BMI is Broadcast Music, Inc., a music licensing company. Founded in 1939, BMI was acquired this year by New Mountain Capital, a private equity firm.
BMI is also widely known as body mass index. An article in MIT Technology Review suggests that BMI should be replaced with another measurement — SAD, sagittal abdominal diameter.
Perhaps under its new ownership, BMI will develop a method for measuring the fat content in music.
