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ft. the beatles, aretha franklin, neil young, dr. dre, serge gainsbourg, duke ellington, the kinks, jimi hendrix, pavement, the clash, smog, the smiths, al green, the rolling stones, cat power, dusty springfield, yo la tengo, antony, wilco, elvis, talking heads, elliott smith, r.e.m., ray charles, velvet underground, otis redding, the monochrome set, randy newman, the cure, gillian welch, queen, stevie wonder & more

"mtv makes me want to smoke crack." -beck

see the archives & a random post

"i just happen to be here, and it's okay." -caetano veloso

"sing a simple song but keep the swing strong." -de la soul

"think straight, keep a clean plate." -joanna newsom

"keep a clean nose, watch the plain-clothes." -bob dylan

"keep your feet warm, but keep your clothes on." -harry nilsson

"it took me about three or four weeks to toilet train my cat, nightlife. most of the time is spent moving the box very gradually to the bathroom." -charles mingus

"she had a chihuahua named carlos that had some kind of skin disease and was totally blind." -tom waits

"you can't hold the hand of a rock 'n' roll man." -joni mitchell

"think about something else. was art tatum talented?" - shoot the piano player

"hey there, hey now, well, you can make a pacemaker blink, easy thing, make a man's heart go bibbity bom. -john cale

"i’ve still got things inside me, sad things, happy things, that people don’t know about." -loretta lynn

"to try to maximize the relationship of listening to a record through promotion is like experiencing driving a car by reading about stimulus programs." -bonnie 'prince' billy

"after cheesecake with all of your friends and family, who's gonna front the bill? me... say you want to take first-class trips, well i want to work those first-class hips. yes i do." -r. kelly

"too much cheesecake too soon, old money's better than new" -roxy music

"my mother used to tell me about vibrations. to think that invisible feelings, invisible vibrations existed scared me to death." -brian wilson

"i'm an idiot for you." -iggy pop

"i mean every letter in the words in the sentences of my quotes." -lil' wayne

"lyrics choochoo from my mouth like locomotion." - pato banton

"i'm going to boogie my scruples away." -lowell george

"i drive a rolls-royce, cause it's good for my voice." -t.rex

"i'm dealing in rock and roll. i'm not a bonafide human being." -phil spector

"phil approached me with a bottle of kosher red wine in one hand and a .45 in the other, put his arm around my shoulder and shoved the revolver into my neck and said, 'leonard, i love you.' i said, 'i hope you do, phil.'" -leonard cohen

"they’d whisper at each other and look at phil and whisper at each other. finally this lady, tanked, comes over to phil and says, 'alright, sonny, what’s your problem?' and he said, 'premature ejaculation, what’s yours?'" -tom wolfe

"he's got a mind like a sewer, and a heart like a fridge" -elvis costello

"i bite my nails and if that fails i go get myself stoned, but when i do i think of you and head myself back home." -gram parsons

"i would say groucho marx, to name one thing, and willie mays, and the second movement of the jupiter symphony, and louis armstrong’s recording of potatohead blues, swedish movies, naturally. sentimental education by flaubert, marlon brando, frank sinatra, those incredible apples and pears by cézanne, the crabs at sam wo’s, tracy’s face." -woody allen

"where have you been all my life?" -emmylou harris, to my brother tommy

"he had a huge room with nothing in it except this huge vast hammond organ, right next door to the police." -david bowie

brian eno songs that will make good book titles for my 10-volume memoir, in order: here he comes, baby's on fire, golden hours, brutal ardour, taking tiger mountain, events in dense fog, through hollow lands, some of them are old, everything merges with the night, dead finks don’t talk

ry cooder albums that every man should own: into the purple valley, boomer's story, paradise and lunch

"really, we don't want people twiddling their goatees over our stuff." -radiohead

thelonious monk's middle name: sphere

#1 song on the white album (tie): long long long, happiness is a warm gun

"the only word is love." -john lennon

"i love songs about horses, railroads, land, judgment day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak and love. and mother. and god." -johnny cash

"i could even find it in my heart to love mike love." -belle & sebastian

"the moon is clear, the sky is bright, i'm happy as the horse's shite." -the pogues

"i hope that you all out there, young, old, tall, short, fat or thin, quick or slow, no matter what kind or color or shape or person you are, if you like to make music, why, go ahead.” -pete seeger

"chuck berry isn't merely the greatest of the rock and rollers, or rather, there's nothing mere about it. say rather that unless we can somehow recycle the concept of the great artist so that it supports chuck berry as well as it does marcel proust, we might as well trash it." -robert christgau

mashable.com says about us: "you can expect the unexpected with this awesome gem. groovy." 33 1/3 says: "it's nice to have someone steer me in a more worthwhile direction." others say: "pulitzer."

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November 28

#988 : jonathan richman - now is better than before (1985)

from jonathan richman’s first 20 years in show business by jonathan richman: “mr. richman was born in boston in 1951. he started to draw pictures all day long from the age of 5. played baseball all day long from the age of 9. this would not leave time for anything else, would it? he took up guitar at 15, started playing in public at 16, and by 17 had caused many people to leave coffee-houses… quickly… with their hands over their ears, and by 18 was sure he wanted to sing professionally… he left home at age 18, moving to new york. since he was ten years old and first was taken there by his parents, he wanted to live there and also his favorite rock band the velvet underground was there along with the artist andy warhol (since deceased)… he admired their sincerity, their dark sound, and their ability to improvise both lyrics and music onstage. his first place to stay in manhattan was on the couch of the personal manager of this velvet underground. after two weeks the manager and his wife and the other person staying there felt that jonathan… well… he immediately found work as a busboy (unbelievably incompetent) and as a foot messenger on wall street.” (emphasis mine)

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June 28

#953: ali farka toure with ry cooder - goye kur (new orleans, 1994)

nine things that ry cooder, california’s finest guitar player, said about mali’s holy ali farka toure during the interview for talking timbuktu’s liner notes:

(1) he has a way of looking down into your throat in a funny way, even when he’s drunk, and knowing a few things.

(2) he’ll just come in and reset the molecules in the room… on the level of a faith healer. on the level of a shaman.

(3) the guy is a big, strong, important man… it’s an expression of his tremendous self-confidence, which is miles wide… you have to get to kind of a soft place with a guy like that, with him.

(4) all through the years, thousands, eons worth of years, what they must have known or had going was a sense that the music is all there, and all you have to do is just become a conduit for it.

(5) that stuff is kaleidoscopic, it all works together, but it’s very cozy… to me, it’s like lightnin’ hopkins backwards.

(6) i’d like to take bootsy collins and some other people and go to africa and see what the fuck’s going on.

(7) he rolls around like a sailor, he rolls, it’s real good… i’m sure they stay up all night over there.

(8) so he says, “wait a minute.” he’s stopped. he’s always speaking french. “where’s the ocean?” i said, “it’s about two blocks.” boy, he put the fiddle down and wouldn’t touch it. i said, “what’s the matter?” he said, “there’s a lot of spirit world in the ocean, and if they hear this and misunderstand, the ocean will come up and drown us right quick.” so i’m not going to argue with that. he’s not making a big thing of it, like “i have seen the vision” and being dramatic. he’s just saying, “no way am i going to play this fiddle two blocks from the ocean – period. don’t ask me to.” “okay.” then we got out in the studio in hollywood, and he began to play a thing and put the fiddle right down. i said, “what’s the matter now?” he said, “there are too many doors in here. the doors are a problem.”

(9) but you know me, i’m just a turnip truck driver from santa monica. i don’t necessarily have any real understanding of this stuff.

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June 5

“pops called us all to his room that sunday morning and said, ‘i’m going down to dexter avenue baptist church to see dr. martin luther king. i’ve been hearing this man and i want to see him, i want to meet him.’ he wanted to know if we’d go with him. we said, ‘yeah, daddy, we want to go.’ we all went to his 11 a.m. service: dr. king was a young man, coretta king was singing in the choir, she had a baby in her arms. at the end of the service, dr. king spoke to pops. he talked for a while. we got back to the hotel and pops called us to his room again. he said, ‘listen you all, i really like this man’s message. and i think if he can preach that, we can sing it. and we said, ‘okay daddy.’”

- her highness mavis staples, remembering montgomery in 1963.

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May 31

“ every note and word and gesture has meaning, and your notes and sung words line up with those of your friends and make a whole statement about life that is tiny but eternal. ry cooder on the late doc watson, in the nytimes

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April 2

#917: rahsaan roland kirk & john cage - sound?? (dir. dick fontaine) - 1967

“franz kline was about to have the first showing of his black and white paintings at the egan gallery. realizing that his mother had never seen his paintings and that she would surely be interested in doing so, he arranged for her to come to new york for the opening. after she had been in the gallery for some time, she said, ‘franz, i might have known you’d find the easy way out.”

- john cage’s a year from monday, the chronicles of hallucinatory minimalist music memoirs.

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April 1

“now there’s the black cross, the green cross, the white cross, the double cross, the criss-cross, and the lost cross. and the cross gets awful heavy at different times, but one is supposed to keep on going on and carrying the cross on his shoulder, because you ain’t supposed to let no cross cross you up. you’re supposed to let a cross help you get across. and if you let a cross help you get across, you won’t get crossed up but you’ll be on the cross ‘cause you done got across on the cross. so if you can remember this, you won’t get lost on the cross while you’re trying to get across. so we’re just here to let you know about it. i know that you knew already, ‘cause y’all the hippest people in the world, hip black and white. but you still know that you got a cross you must deal with. so when it crosses you up, go on and deal with it, and leave it alone.”

- rahsaan roland kirk, giving the most important speech since harry nilsson’s the point

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February 11

the gerry mulligan page on the website brainy quote is the horse e books of jazz. “new york is still where i live most of the time,” gerry mulligan once said, it claims. “i’ve appeared on some other people’s albums,” he reportedly stated another time.

because gerry mulligan played the baritone saxophone like an ice pick, an ice pick made out of ice (especially on mainstream of jazz), one can only assume he had much profounder things to say. in fact—after writing that sentence i’ve found a recording of his oral autobiography about being a scratch-your-eyes-out drug addict, on the library of congress’ website. it’s about the “one time when we gave artificial respiration for about eight hours straight to keep a guy going.”

“after gail and i split up,” he says, “i started to get back into my old habits with heroin. not ever to the extent that i had been involved in new york, but still enough that it was an ongoing thing, and it was time-consuming and constant.” in other words, gerry mulligan’s period after splitting up with whomever gail was of constant heroin use was somehow not as horrible as another period in new york city. to imagine what could possibly have made that other period worse provides a small peak into the misery of the word “habits.”

update: and so does the story about whitney houston’s death on the cover of the times.

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November 15

“i just got home from serving my time. there’s a baby in the family, and i know he’s now mine. he’s not mine, there’s no way he could be, for i’ve been gone five long years and the little baby’s only three. he looks and acts like me, he’s even got my name. oh how i love him! beacuse he’s my son just the same. he’s a proud little fella, he’s a cute little lad. oh, i know the reason he looks and acts like me. because my brother is his dad.” - o.v. wright. he died on nov. 16, 1980.

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November 12

this week i spent all my free time reorganizing my old records—because, really, why anyone would spend their open hours doing something else is totally beyond me—and found things like two charlie christian albums i hadn’t heard in a year. “time removes fads,” barney kessel once said. “shakespeare today is no less than he ever was; so charlie christian stands up.” barney was right.

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September 13

“tutti fanno gli stupidi.”

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September 5

“time and life building! american hotel! cbs building! rca building! first national city bank!”

(no. 1 and no. 2)

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August 1

from the cover of the cathy’s clown single, which is very good, although it could also have just said “i die each time i hear this sound,” in pink letters

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March 8

“ grandchildren now don’t write a thank-you for the christmas presents, they’re walking on their pants with the cap on backwards listening to the enema man and snoopy snoopy poop dogg. and they don’t like them! senator alan simpson, with words for marshall mathers and calvin broadus on fox news. a bonus point for his kicker, which i think suggests that hip-hop fans don’t actually enjoy the music.

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January 11

#726: nina simone - what’s free to you speech

in the radio station in my apartment, a ten-day block of nina simone just started in anticipation of martin luther king jr day. is there anything finer? just look at her talk. ”what’s free to you?” a french-sounding interviewer asks. ”what’s free to me? same thing it is to you, you tell me,” she says. “no, you tell me,” says the frenchman. ”it’s just a feeling. it’s like how do you tell somebody how it feels to be in love? you cannot do it to save your life. you can describe things, but you can’t tell them, but you know it when it happens. that’s what i mean by free. i had a couple of times on the stage when i really felt free, and that’s something else. that’s something else!”

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