Notify, Volume II

More "NOT-ify"...

Let's begin with some Zman recs. Z's favorite Notify track is this version of "Gin House Blues" by Nina Simone...
 

According to Z, "also available on Notify is the original version of I'm That Type of N**** by the Pharcyde which slaps orders of magnitude harder than the Spotify version (I assume there's a copyright issue with the sample)":

Back to the Whitney channel, here what's airing on my Notify waves...

Egregiously on Notify: De La Soul. Rob lamented this absence to me, Z has said it before, and it's a fact. We could put most anything below and it wouldn't be on mass streaming music, but we'll start at the start: album #1.

Arcade Fire does a killer take on my favorite Clash song.

And here's The Clash themselves with an early instrumental you can only find on Super Black Market Clash, "Listen." 

Aztec Camera taking Van Halen down a notch...

Camper van Beethoven - Last time was Key Lime Pie, here's Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. Starts out with a classic, Eye of Fatima. Favorites include a postmodern "O Death," "One of These Days," "Turquoise Jewelry," and "Tania," the rare song about Patty Hearst and the SLO.

Enjoy, and post more random stuff you can't find on the major music sites.

Notify, Volume I

That's pronounced "NOT-ify"...

I love Spotify.  I was slow to jump in on it, since I had (have) a hard drive with 36,000+ songs on it that I have collected, compiled, bought, beg, borrowed, and maybe even stolen across three decades. After a while, since I didn't possess the technology to access my HD anywhere on the globe, I could no longer deny the convenience that Spotify offers. It's pretty cool.

For a while, certain musical artists held out from the platform for purist or purely pecuniary reasons. And in truth, a lot of them weren't being selfish; it's well known that Spotify pays artists exactly jack diddley. Such is life as a rock and roller in the 21st century. Ask Rootsy, Les Coole, and Greasetruck.

Anyway, Spotify certainly does the trick for me, and these days, by now mostly everyone and everything is up there.  Mostly.

Some of my favorite stuff isn't there. Cool stuff I'd love to put on a playlist and expose to music fiends and friends everywhere. I don't just mean live stuff, there are cool studio tracks and one-off moments that should be shared.  So here I go with Volume I of Notify.

Brian Wilson sings "Brian Wilson"... I love this.

Still my favorite mash-up of all time...

A random one. When I was 15, someone gave my dad UB40's Little Baggariddim EP on cassette for his 40th birthday. UB40, get it? Hilarious. Anyway, he never bothered with it and I scooped it up.
The hit was the cover of "I Got You Babe" with Chrissie Hynde. I quickly skipped past that for a mini-treasure trove with "Don't Break My Heart," "Hip Hop Lyrical Robot," the super great/green "Mi Spliff," and a new and improved version of one of their early hits, "One in Ten." You can't find this version anywhere except on this EP, and I dig it the most.

Camper van Beethoven / David Lowery had a bone to pick with Spotify, and a $43 million lawsuit settlement caught some attention. A bit of Camper's stuff is still missing from Spotify, including most of Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart and Key Lime Pie. 

Here's the latter. You've heard their cover of "Pictures of Matchstick Men," but again, I'd skip over it most of the time. Check out the three song mega-tandem of "When I Win the Lottery," "(I Was Born in a) Laundromat,", and "Borderline." 


Enjoy, and post more random stuff you can't find on the major music sites.

Fuel for My Inferiority Complex

zson and I have competed in several Cub Scout Pinewood Derby events.  We had the third-fastest car our first year, largely because I was a Cub Scout and I knew there are a bunch of easy things you need to do to make the car faster, and I suspected that most of the dads had no idea how to use a hand saw let alone polish an axle, and I also suspected that most of the dads are also hyper-competitive type-A nut jobs so they would work themselves into a lather after losing the first year and watch all sorts of YouTubes on how to make these little cars go fast, so I put a lot of time into getting the axles smooth, polishing the insides of the wheels, and getting the car right up to the legal weight limit with most of the weight right in front of the rear axle.  As I predicted, the other dads came back with a vengeance after that and bought some woodworking tools (and possibly bought fast cars on the internet, but that's a different story). 

This year we decided to chase the best design category instead of speed.  zson thought a VW Camper Van would be cool and relatively easy.  He was right and wrong, respectively.  The project involved two blocks of wood to get the correct aspect ratio, lots of drilling and failed attempts to use Juan Carlos's palm router to remove lots of wood from the middle to get under the weight limit, a little sawing and a lot of sanding.  We found some groovy reflective iridescent paper for the windows, printed some Grateful Dead images for the rear, and got a VW logo from a brochure at the local dealer.  We were very happy with the results.

We took the first place trophy for design so the judges liked it too.  I felt pretty good about my automotive woodworking skills.  Then I saw this video.

I hope this guy doesn't show up at next year's Pinewood Derby.