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Utopian Turtletop. Monsieur Croche's BĂȘte Noire. Contact: turtletop [at] hotmail [dot] com

Tuesday, August 07, 2007


music and memory.


1. Heard "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" by Elvin Bishop on Oldies radio and, man, I was in junior high school again. When I actually think about how awkward I felt in the world at that time, the memory is not particularly sweet, but damn, when I heard that song, it sounded and felt great, and I felt wistful for days long gone that will never return.

2. "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" was followed by "Feel Like Makin' Love" on Oldies, and that took me back to the early '90s, when my anarcho-feminist artist roommate hipped me to Two Nice Girls' acoustic medley of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" and "Feel Like Makin' Love" on their Like a Version EP of covers. I haven't seen my old roommate in almost 10 years, and I haven't heard Two Nice Girls in about that time. That's the only thing I ever heard by them. I don't remember the rest of the EP, except their relaxed country-shuffle arrangement of "Speed Racer." Bad Co.'s song has an interesting arrangement -- bucolic hippie-country verses and the most heavy pelvic-thrusting electric guitar riff on the choruses of any rock song I can think of. As the lead guitar squealed over the vocal in the out-chorus, I pictured a wailing penis. Rock!

3. Some months before my grandpa died in 1999, age 91, I visited him and we sang a song his mother had taught him and he had taught me, "Animal Fair" (which Carl Sandburg identified as a minstrel song in American Songbag). Grandpa got teary, remembering days more than 80 years gone that would never, ever come back.



p.s. These are the days, my friends. Do you think they'll ever end?



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