Free is cheaper than cheap, and that was how I acquired the first three Cheap Trick albums, as promo copies from the radio station. Cheap Trick was outside the station’s Adult Contemporary format, that relied heavily on James Taylor, Barbra Streisand, and Barry Manilow.
https://youtu.be/FQDc9loiFuk
In Color and Heaven Tonight are particularly good, and they’re in my latest pile of frequency played albums. Cheap Trick at Budokan escaped my grasp. By then Cheap Trick was a big name act, and I was the Les Nessman of the station, working as a one-man news department. One of the DJ’s must have grabbed it.
Good, old Logitech Media Server, aka Squeezebox. The SiriusXM and Amazon Music apps are long gone, and I still haven’t figured out if AAC-to-MP3 transcoding can be made to work for live streaming stations.* Nevertheless, after 12 years, LMS continues to be my most useful digital music source, between having a Logitech Squeezebox Touch, two Squeezebox Radios, and the Squeezeplay PC software.
Logitech stopped making the hardware ten years ago, but they keep mysqueezebox.com running, and occasionally the official release version of the server software gets updated. Something I appreciate with Squeezeplay is how quickly I can jump between stations, as I demonstrate here in one of my TuneIn categories.
An insignificant quirk is that with stations showing information for individual songs, the menu matches what’s being played only when first loaded.
*Examples of stations using AAC are Luxuriamusic and Boss Radio 66. This is the same TuneIn menu seen in the video, as presented on my Onkyo receiver, which supports AAC.
This is something I started working on six months ago, following an e-mail exchange with good, ol’ Denro. Something that’s an inescapable interest for us, as well as the re-issue professionals we have contact with — Steve Hoffman, Bob Irwin, Andrew Sandoval, and Steve Stanley — is 1960’s record production (with Hoffman going further afield, in both directions).
After the introduction of tape recorders (thank you, Nazi Germany) made overdubs and editing possible, recording studios evolved into becoming instruments themselves. It became more likely that the difference between a hit and a flop could be determined not only by who performed the song, but how the record was produced and engineered.
Here’s an example. “Bend Me, Shape Me” by the American Breed debuted on December 2, 1967, and in early ’68 it became a top 5 hit. But that wasn’t the first time someone had taken a bash at the tune.
There was a very Psychedelic version by an obscure girl group, as produced by Tom Wilson, whose many credits included Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel.
The Outsiders, whose “Time Won’t Let Me” in ’66 was also a #5 hit, put “Bend Me, Shape Me” on their third album.
Within a couple of tom-tom beats, I recognize American Breed’s hit record. I would characterize the sound as nudging its way into Bubblegum Land.
Music Mike provides some background on the single vs. the album version of the song.
Music Mike has one of those classic Top 40 DJ deliveries that I have always admired, but wasn’t able to master myself during my stint at an AM radio mic. So let’s give a listen to Mike talking-up one of my all-time favorite singles.
Tech sidebar: Curiously, Music Mike’s site behaves the way mine used to do here. By default it’s presented to the Net as unencrypted HTTP, but if you specify HTTPS the encryption works. Which is good, except his pop-up player isn’t working with HTTPS, only HTTP. I checked TuneIn, and because it sees HTTP for the stream it won’t play the station through most browsers. This isn’t the sort of technical trouble that FCC-licensed radio station engineers used to handle.
You remember the opening of Ghost World, don’t you, with that catchy Bollywood number? The singing was dubbed by Mohammed Rafi.
Rafi also sang this equally engaging theme five years earlier, in 1960.
I’m reminded of one of the more inspired moments from The Big Bang Theory.
And from Amazon Prime’s series The Boys, there’s a scene that surprises by breaking out in American song and dance, rather than the ultra-extreme violence it’s infamous for dishing out in gory gobs.
Come to think of it, I have yet to see La La Land…
… which was inspired by something exquisite that I have seen.
