Oh, Mother Goose, She's On the Skids...

In a recent post I talked about the 33 1/3 series of books and said I would think about what album I might write a book about. I’ve read a couple articles about this series of books that claim the albums written about aren’t your typical “best rock records of all time” kind of albums. It seems there are some really big albums that do fall into that “best of” category, but the people writing about them don’t typically take the “this is the best album ever because…” approach. Like I said in the first post, I’ve only read one of the books. I would love to read a whole lot more, but I’m cheap and the library doesn’t carry them. Anyway, here are some albums that I know intimately enough to write a book about them. Some of them aren’t great. Some of them are outstanding. Regardless, I know these albums like the back of my hand no matter how great or flawed they might be.

The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner – Ben Folds Five
Not their best work, but fascinating as hell.

Bringing it All Back Home – Bob Dylan
I have a theory that this is the first ever rap album. I’d like the opportunity to expound on this.

Tomorrow the Green Grass – The Jayhawks
Whenever I think about this album I want to hear it immediately.

Arthur or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire – The Kinks
The only book in the series I’ve read is the Kinks’ Village Green. I think Arthur is just as good if not better than VG.

The Off White Album – Dennis Miller
It’s a rarity for a comedy album to standup after repeated listens (pun firmly intended). This is Dennis Miller at his best…you know, before he put politics over being funny which is a big no-no in my book. I don’t mind political comedians; I just don’t like it when they start to rank making their point over making people laugh. I find it insulting.

Fables of the Reconstruction / Automatic for the People / Reveal – R.E.M.
These should be kind of obvious because I know more about R.E.M. than any other band. I’m choosing Fables because I think it’s an extremely underrated album. Also, I heard somewhere that Bill Berry wrote the entire album by himself. Who knew? Automatic because it was the first R.E.M. album that I went and bought on the day it came out and spent the next year and a half obsessed with it (I was young and foolish then, I feel old and foolish now.) And Reveal because I think it’s underrated too. Up might make a better story because it was the first album after Bill Berry left the band, but I think Reveal is a much better album than Up and it has always seemed to me that Reveal is the album they were trying to make when they made Up.

Horses – Patti Smith
Normally this kind of album isn’t my thing. In fact I didn’t really like it for the first few years after I bought it. Now I could probably write a whole book on “Land” alone. Also, I have this album to thank for not being able to keep a straight face during the only church service I enjoy every year – the Christmas Eve music service. Everything goes just fine until the organ starts the open bars of “Angels We Have Heard on High” and I know it’s coming. Everyone begins to sing, “Angels we have heard on high sweetly singing o’er the plains / And the mountains in reply, Echoing their joyous strains – and this is where everyone sings “Gloria in excelsis Deo!” but I have Patti Smith’s whine in my head: “G-L-O-R-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-G-L-O-R-I-A!”

Underwater Moonlight – The Soft Boys
A book could be filled with words describing the greatness of these 10 songs alone. However, juxtaposing this album to the rest of the music scene in the late 70s and early 80s would go a long way in highlighting just how far above the cut this album was.

Flood / Apollo 18 – They Might Be Giants
These are the two TMBG albums that got me hooked, although I could write about any number of their albums. Vaguely interesting side note: I had Flood on cassette and it got messed up sometime in 1994 so I ordered the CD from BMG. The day it arrived in the mail is the same day the flood started in middle Georgia. Coincidence? I sure hope so.

On the Beach – Neil Young
This album is beautiful. It’s also funny. I could see where someone would think it’s self-indulgent with lines like, “I need a crowd of people but I can’t face them day to day.” That line is delivered with all the earnest Neil Young-ness you could imagine, but I really think it’s tongue-in-cheek.

(There are a few more that I didn’t list because they are the really big albums; some by The Beatles, some by The Stones, some that people have already written about, etc.)

What album(s) would you write about?

I Fall to Pieces Each Time I Strain My Quadricep

I have been looking forward to the first Falcons game of the season for a while. I’m a Falcons fan. I’m only a marginal NFL fan, but I have always been a hometown fan kind of guy (maybe home-state is more appropriate, but you get the idea). Anyway, the Falcons have not been a popular pick for Monday Night Football games during their history, so I haven’t seen a whole lot of MNF games. Sure I’ll flip over to them while watching other things, but last night’s Falcons opener is the first time in a long time I’ve been excited about a game on Monday night. I was so excited I even watched that countdown show on ESPN despite it being hosted by Stuart Scott. About halfway through the countdown show a “fight” erupted on the field between a group of Falcons and the Eagles. I put the word fight in quotes because, well, when you’re in football pads and helmets, can it really be a fight? I’d call it a skirmish at best. Anyway, two guys were tossed before the game even started. I don’t know if this has ever happened before, but even if it hasn’t it was no reason for Stuart Scott, Michael Irvin, and company to treat it like a shot had just come from the book depository. Wait, it’s ESPN, why was I surprised?

So MNF starts and they do their little sketch. I guess they have pressure to make these as tame as possible ever since that Desperate Housewives/Terrell Owens thing last year because this one took place in a control tower at Heartsfield-Jackson-Cougar-Mellencamp International Airport. It starred Clint Howard, Robert Carradine, Peter Boyle, and Joe Namath. Well, you can’t get any less sexy than that. (Still no word on the validity of the rumor that Joe Namath was drunk during the filming of the sketch and called Carradine “one sexy nerd” while trying to stick his tongue down his throat.) By the way, is it any coincidence that the two biggest TV censorship issues in the past couple of years have been because of football? Is it because football is the only thing a lot of people watch together anymore? Just asking.

When the actual football coverage started I was immediately reminded of just how out of it John Madden can be sometimes. (I’m talking about the football guy, not the director of Shakespeare in Love.) Does everybody just cut him slack because of those video games and his age? While talking about the Philadelphia Eagles in the intro he actually said that they would be in trouble if they lost 3 or 4 in a row. Really, John? You think? Are you telling me that a team that plays a 16 game schedule would be in trouble if they lost 3 or 4 games in a row? I would have never known. The whole thing reminded me of that SNL sketch they did after Dennis Miller started doing MNF games. Will Ferrell played Dan Fouts and said stuff like, “That's right, Al. Tampa Bay is an excellent, excellent football team. But the Vikings have a great football team too. Al, my prediction is that whoever puts the most points on the scoreboard will probably win tonight's football game.” It was parody, but it couldn’t have been more spot-on. Sadly, that’s the majority of analysis you get on televised sports these days.

At halftime Al Michaels got to introduce a new segment for MNF. Each week Tim McGraw changes the lyrics to his song “I Like It I Love It” to reflect what went down in the previous week in football. I’m not sure what the best part of this segment was. It was either the fact that Al Michaels introduced it like it was the last thing he wanted to do or it could have been during the actual video for this week’s version of the song when Tim put his arm around a silver-haired old lady that looked exactly like David Letterman’s mom. It seems that Janet Jackson’s tit has scared the NFL so much they won’t even let Tim McGraw hug a hot chick during his weekly football video. All hot chicks are now relegated to the beer commercials only. Now this brings the total number of country songs that get their lyrics changed each week on MNF to two. They’ve got Hank Williams Jr’s “Rowdy Friends” in the opening and now the Tim McGraw song at halftime. Where will it end? Personally, I’m hoping for a revamped “I Fall to Pieces” for each injury update. And is there any reason they couldn’t have quickly reworked “Fist City” when talking about the pre-game brawl?

Well, maybe I should actually say a few words about the game. I haven't read anything about it yet today but I imagine there are a lot of people saying the Falcons got lucky because of the ejection before the game. I suppose that's true. The Falcons did rush a lot last night and the Eagles guy that was ejected was their top defensive guy against the rush. But if the Eagles kicker would have made two of his missed field goals, they would have won anyway. No matter what the supposed injustice is in sports, playing the if game is pointless. Unless you are talking about Game 5 of the 1997 NLCS. Eric Greg called anything that landed in Charles Johnson's glove a strike. I used to think my memory of this game was just fuzzy, but I saw some clips of it the other day and there's no way Livan Hernandez wins that game without Eric Greg behind the plate. Why hasn't there been an investigation into that game? We can call players in front of congress because of steroids, but we can't get to the bottom of whether Hernandez bribed Greg? Look at that. I started writing about football and ended up on baseball. Imagine that.