song tag

Just pretend that it’s Friday night. I wrote the first part Friday night and am JUST NOW finishing.  
 
Well, I am supposed to be in Asheville right now, paying an obligatory visit to the parents, but our vehicles have managed to stage a dramatic little theatre piece involving the Falling Apart Simultaneously Dance so I’ve had to postpone my trip. It’s a testament to how much I did NOT want to go to Asheville that I’m not as upset about all the money we’re shelling out for repairs as I am pleased that I have a really good excuse not to go to Asheville.
 

The Colt actually had its episode yesterday. For some reason the brakes in that car give you no warning that they are going to need to be fixed. It’s fine one second and the next it sounds like you’re dragging a bathtub behind you. An old-fashioned enormous metal one. So it started the terrifying bathtub-dragging-noise yesterday afternoon, when Baker B was coming back to work from lunch. It was so awful that we just had it towed to the car repair place. We have this wonderful shop here that does most things – Boone Tire, who has been around since I was a college student and always bought my VW Bug’s tires from them. They don’t do engine work but do nearly everything else, including brakes. So we towed it in. They called Baker B with the alarming news that it was going to cost something like $430 because it needed a number of things, including rotors. In a testament to why I love and trust them, when we got there they said they’d found out it wasn’t as bad as they thought (I don’t remember exactly what was and wasn’t wrong since people talking to me about cars sound just like Charlie Brown’s teacher and all I hear is "Wah wahh waaahh wah wahhh!") and it was just $330. Which is bad enough, of course, but less bad than $430. 
 
 However, on the way over to pick up the Colt, the CIVIC starts making weird noises. Especially when I turn right- it sounds like something’s scraping in the back part of the car. So Baker B looks under it and the muffler is falling off. (As a side note, one of my favorite lines from M*A*S*H was when a jeep breaks down in the middle of nowhere and Margaret is demanding to know what’s wrong with it, and Hawkeye says, "How should I know?? Maybe the muffler’s unravelled.") We take it on over to Boone Tire and sadly they don’t do mufflers, but they have somebody they like who does, and they call these guys for us and if we can bring it in first thing in the morning they’ll work us in. They’re open half days on Saturday. So I certainly can’t drive down to Asheville with my muffler unravelling, and I can’t leave Baker B carless tomorrow, so I get to stay here! Yay!!! My aunt and uncle are there anyhow, so it’s not like the parents have no company. I’m trying to wean them off the idea they got when my father had surgery, that I’d be coming down every single weekend for the rest of my life.  
 
SO. The point, which I’ve spent way too long getting to, is that I’ve got time to do one of my three tags now that I’m here instead of in Asheville. Since I’ve been uploading songs into my iPod, I’m going to do the one Noko tagged me for:
 
Name six of your favorite songs. Or songwriters. Or whatever. Noko is very laid-back in her taggings, which I love.
 
Okay.
 
Bet you’ll never guess who number one is.
 

That second picture is Tom Waits and Jim Jarmusch, the director. Another of my heroes, but that’s a different entry. I love that picture and have it as one of my screensavers at work, but didn’t have it on my home computer. SO I hunt for about an hour on all the Tom Waits sites I can find (one major reason I never finished this at the time). No luck. Finally it occurs to me to Google images – and it’s the first one that pops up. Out of about a million. I thought that was weird.

 ANYHOW, he’s number one. (I nearly capitalized "he", he’s so number one.) He’s got this really gravelly, raspy voice. One review I read compared him to Oscar the Grouch singing incomprehensible French showtunes. Another said he sounded like a drunken pirate.  But he writes fantastic lyrics that all tell stories. Deranged stories, but stories. And I LOVE stories. He’s very emotional, too, oddly. I also love that. I became a Tom Waits fan after seeing the movie Smoke, which has this really odd little thing at the end where a main character in the movie is telling a story while it’s being acted out on the film, with Innocent When You Dream playing. Not long after that I happened across a movie called Big Time that Bravo was showing – this really bizarre kind of concert film but he’s doing things like singing Innocent When You Dream while standing in a bathtub on a rooftop, with an umbrella. I was enchanted. I ordered Frank’s Wild Years and that was that.  

 Baker B can’t stand to hear him sing, although after seeing him on Fishing With John he’s a big Tom Waits fan too. As long as he doesn’t sing. He went through a really annoying spell of falling asleep on the couch and refusing to get up and go to bed, so I started playing Innocent When You Dream to make him get up. After doing that once or twice, all I have to do is move towards the CD player and he’s off like a shot to bed.  

Another favorite is Erik Satie. He was a very peculiar French composer, and I could listen to his piano pieces all day. Especially Gymnopédies and all the many Gnossiennes. He was really odd and one of his very short pieces, Vexations, was meant to be played 840 times in a row. As per his instructions: “To play this motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.” Gymnopédies is my very favorite, though, and would probably rank in the six favorite pieces of music too. I wish I knew howto play it here, but if you go to that Erik Satie page there are listenable links. So go! Listen! That Gymnopédies version is a little slow for me, but you’ll get the idea.  

And I have to include REM, since for years and years and years they were my favorite favorite band. From the time I was just out of college and Document came out. It turned me into an REM fiend. Which continued throughout the 80s and into the 90’s. Until Monster, which was the last one I really liked. I’m not sure what happened to them, but the next two were just all … samey. Everything sounded alike. They weren’t different any more. I didn’t even buy their latest one. Listened to samples, said ewwwww, and sadly clicked away. But I still love old REM, and my iPod is full of them.  

REM got replaced by Radiohead in my affections. Oh, I love Radiohead. I think I love every new album more than the last, which is always a good sign. They’re odd, they’re unusual, they have great lyrics and they’re just weird. What more can you ask? They’re my new Favorite Favorites, after Tom Waits, of course.  

This is really difficult.  

For newer stuff, I’ll go with Badly Drawn Boy. The first CD especially – The Hour of Bewilderbeast. It’s another one with great lyrics, interesting stories, just all around well done. I didn’t like One Plus One Is One so much – I think he was trying too hard. Still plan to get Have You Fed The Fish. 

I think for my last one I’ll have to pick Tori Amos, just … because. I don’t even have that much by Tori Amos, but Boys For Pele is one of my favorite albums ever. So that alone qualifies her for the list. I think. I did just get this really odd CD called Strange Little Girls, which is Tori singing other people’s songs. Like Time, one of my very favorite Tom Waits songs. And I’m Not In Love, that old old 10CC song. And Heart of Gold, Neil Young, which she pretty much slaughters and leaves for dead. And I Don’t Like Mondays, which is why I bought the CD – I heard it on, of all things, West Wing. Amusingly I really like the ones she does that I wasn’t familiar with to begin with, but am not so wild about a lot of the others. Except I Don’t Like Mondays. I like that almost as much as the Boomtown Rats’ one.

Okay, that’s it. If you’ve made it this far, you get a gold star! And now I tag Marg, Falling Dog, and Jasspirit. And anyone else who wants to tackle this, and it’s NOT EASY.