Tuesday Tuneage
Public Enemy - "Don't Believe The Hype"
1988

Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back came out in 1988 and during my first listens to it in 1989, I knew it was unique and great and a landmark. Sonically and lyrically revolutionary, and funny, the album contains unforgettable mottos that I've appropriated over the years, trying to slip them into conversations, tweets, and asides: Bring the noise, How low can you go?, Don't believe the hype, Who gives a fuck about a goddamn Grammy?, No more music by the suckers.

Once at work back in the late eighties, my pal and fellow writer Janell - she's the one who bought me the first notebook that I seriously scribbled through in the nineties - had bought a mini tape recorder to assist her in her writing and pulled it on me in the break room, asking me to say something. I immediately said: "No more music by the suckers" and of course was overly gleeful when she played it back to quizzical looks all around. Nobody in that room knew what I was talking about, of course. Then again, I barely did.

My fave one lately is when I saw the headline of the Star Tribune on June 27, 2015 - RIGHT TO MARRY FOR ALL - and unleashed a "Yeahhhhh boy!!!" that my neighbors likely heard.

As for "Don't Believe The Hype": How many times have I brought that slogan out in the past quarter-century-plus? For any number of overrated movies (Forrest Gump), TV shows (Six Feet Under), bands (where do I start? I'll use Ben Folds Five as a placeholder …), sports teams (so many Gophers hockey teams), boozes (Johnnie Walker Black), food (Krispy Kreme, Popeye's chicken - at least the location four blocks north of my place), the Aeron chair (good way to further mess up an already-messed up back), any big-name designer promoted hard by Target, literary novels (Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue) … etc. etc.

All those cheap shots, good thing I live alone. Plus all those cheap shots divert from the basic core of this wacky little post: In 2015 as in any other year since I bought it, when I track It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back it still feels like I'm listening to some mind-blowing music from the future. For reasons too lengthy to get into here, I lost track of hip-hop in the early nineties. Time to play some catch up, starting with Public Enemy.

And does Hot 102.5 FM have a request line?

Tuesday Tuneage
Kevn Kinney - "Heard The Laughter Ending"
1990

7th Street Entry, fall 1990. Went to check out Drivin' N' Cryin', a blast - both ears-wise and mood-wise - of a night that ended with them doing the Ramones with Bob Stinson guesting on guitar, it starts with a polite-as-heck guy my age wearing a nice sweater asking me if I had heard the band before. I said no, I showed up on a recommendation of a friend. He tells me to check out the lead singer Kevn Kinney's solo album. That it's mostly acoustic, produced by Peter Buck, outstanding. That he's called Cities FM to request that they add Kinney to their playlist.

I soon bought Drivin' N' Cryin's Mystery Road, a solid and at times spectacular album. Around the same time I also got the Kinney album, MacDougal Blues and was stunned. This was the type of folk music I could rally around. I hyped it incessantly to friends, nobody seemed to care though my pal the receptionist at the office I work at was intrigued when I played a bit of a song over the phone to her.

It's no secret that I'm not a lyrics guy, but Kinney's "Heard The Laughter Ending" is brilliant words-wise. A snapshot of an also-ran of a comedian working away on the road because it's all he knows to do, dreaming of getting home to an imaginary plush mansion far, far away from where he grew up. He plays small rooms, isn't asked to do a residency or come back any time soon. He somehow plays a bigger room, he bombs, he's quickly forgotten. One thinks of the episode of Louie that features Doug Stanhope. A mirror is mentioned twice, and that imagery takes you to the final scene of Raging Bull. The comedian in this tune does finally get to go home, we're not sure if it's a victory or a loss.

Tuesday Tuneage
Los Pets - "Hello I Love You"
circa mid-sixties

The Doors were for the most part dorks, let's admit. Their shorter songs were inevitably their better ones, that way the bands' hackneyed sound and Jim Morrison's pretensions were left fewer chances to be exposed. Francis Ford Coppola found great use of "The End" in Apocalypse Now and while the likes of "People Are Strange" do strike a certain chord in the I'm-weird/I'm-unwanted/I'm-so-alone category, it was soon outclassed by the likes of "Do You Know How It Feels" by The Flying Burrito Brothers. You don't hear many great covers of Doors songs either. What do you think of when you hear "Doors cover"? That you've wandered into what looks to be a cool dive bar for an Old Style and a shot of bar whiskey, but there's some lame hippie band meandering through a lounge-music-with-bad-poetry bore. (Maybe Blood, Sweat & Tears should have covered "Touch Me"? That mighta worked.)

So. We are left with this tune by Los Pets and it's the one great cover of a Doors song, and it's amazing. This run through "Hello I Love You" is more punk than most anything to come down the pipe from the UK or US the following decade(s), better trash than any number of overhyped tracks you've heard over the years. Fuzz-guitar greatness replaces the chintzy Manzarek keyboards, and it's vocals in left ear, that guitar in right. It stands as a certain singular madness of garage rock genius. The liner notes to Mexican Rock and Roll Rumble and Psych-Out South Of The Border succinctly/correctly state: "The Pets were actually from Venezuela and the Doors should've sounded like this in Hell!"

Tuesday Tuneage
The Reds - "Self Reduction"
1979

The Reds are/were a whatchyamacallit band out of Pennsylvania. Easy to dig, harder to label. Like The Cars (new wave with a hard rock edge) and Cheap Trick (hard rock, but we thought they might be new wave due to their name and Rick Nielsen's outfits), The Reds made one of those late-seventies debuts that decidedly sounded quite unlike anything out there in hard rock or new wave. They were arty enough to win over the college rockers, had prominent cool keyboards to signal to the new wavers, and had guitar riffage to placate the hard rockers. And they weren't just some grab bag of genres attempting to be all things to all listeners: Their self-titled debut album from 1979 shows a band that doesn't mail it in or go cold, a singer who sounds like he gives a damn.

I only became aware of them while doing my bimonthly skimming through Chuck Eddy's Stairway To Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums In The Universe, where he tucked their first album in at #279 between ZZ Top's Tejas and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts' I Love Rock 'n Roll. Eddy correctly described them as "sorta like if Joy Division had come from a Philly suburb instead of some stupid factory burg in Blighty." Enough for me to take a six-bucks gamble on their their debut album at Amazon. It contains nine tracks of angsty/angly high-quality rock. Cool cover, too.

So who the fuck exactly were these guys? They seem to still exist as a rumor thirty-five plus years after their A&M debut. Nobody ever slapped a Reds tape into my hands as a youth, they don't show up on those same radio stations that play "What Do All the People Know" by The Monroes, and they aren't appearing this summer at Mystic Lake Casino (featuring two original members.) Googling gets you a few songs on YouTube, that they contributed to the soundtrack for the Chris Elliott vehicle Manhunter, and that they did a garagey version of The Doors' "Break On Through" (though it doesn't top the sheer punk garagey-ness of Los Pets' rip through "Hello, I Love You".) So The Reds are but a postpunk rumor, a mystery for pop archivists to tackle in 2015.

Tuesday Tuneage
Aerosmith - “Let The Music Do The Talking”
1985

A comeback from back when comebacks still mattered, you gotta love the sheer Orwellian audacity of Aerosmith starting off their Done With Mirrors album with a cover of the best song from the Joe Perry Project. (Joe Perry is a member of Aerosmith, Joe Perry has always been a member of Aerosmith.) Like an aging boxer throwing haymakers in a one-last-defense-of-the-title match, it harks back to classic Aerosmith raunch. Outstanding rumbling rhythm, that swagger, Perry’s slide guitar. The lyrics also swagger, they tap into Carl Perkins' "one for the money, two for the show…" but take it somewhere else.

Perkins' rock ‘n’ roll take on a nursery rhyme started the song which put him on the map. (Though many associate it with Elvis Presley. This was a critical moment in a WKRP in Cincinnati episode when Johnny Fever realizes he has truly sold out when he credits “Blue Suede Shoes” to Presley rather than Perkins.) It takes me back to a short story in Boys' Life in the mid-seventies about the free spirit quarterback of the football team who is a flake - and a winner - and once calls out the signals by singing: ”One for the money, two for the show....” Boys' Life had some great short fiction, stories I would read again and again. They had a whole series about these kids who found a time machine and had adventures in time travel. One brilliant story here was when the narrator devises a way to place a phone call to himself in another timeline. Man, that story blew me away. 

Then there was the story about this regular kid who is recruited by his high school’s chess team coach to play on the team because he knows how the game is played and the coach needs a body to fill out the roster. This kid works and studies at chess, becomes not half-bad, ends up scoring victory after victory (a forfeit may have been involved) in a tournament, then ends up in the championship against the Local Teenage Chess Terror, a character obviously based on Bobby Fischer. Our hero figures his magical run is over, but early in his match against the prodigy, he realizes Fischer Junior has fallen into playing the losing side of a past grandmasters’ match he has long memorized. The protaganist is also familiar with this match and realizes his opponent is on an autopilot losing mission. He has an inner debate: Is it ethically okay to claim this easy victory? And does he want the attention of being the local chess champion when he will undoubtably be exposed as a chess fraud in the next tournament? Wish I had kept some of those issues or at least cut out the stories that I loved.

But I daydream. Back to Aerosmith and “Let The Music Do The Talking”: They outdid the Joe Perry Project version and you can give equal shares to Tyler’s personality and the band for their inspired playing. Me, I see PRODUCED BY TED TEMPLEMAN and you might guess at what kind of rambling I’m going to concoct after enough listens, enough coffee, and sudden memories of the mid-seventies, the mid-eighties, and a lifetime of reading.

Tuesday Tuneage
Humble Pie - "30 Days In The Hole"
1972

This is what happens

 when Peter Frampton's sunny disposition

 and boyish good looks

 aren't around to save us.

This ain't The Small Faces. It's not Lazy Sunday; one of those precious, dainty English songs. Like when Small Faces morphed into The Faces, Steve Marriott's Pie outfit embraced soul screaming and jagged guitars.

   background female soul singers
   booming bass rolls into it late,
   harmonica

imitation of a stuttering Southern lawman threatening to cut your hair, jailhouse bound

   a greasy whore, Hammond B-3
   finger snapping
   still controlled enough to pass for blue-eyed soul
     but about to tilt hard into boogie

Enough drug references to make you look for a B12 shot: Red Lebanese, dust, coke spoon, Newcastle Brown (smack, not the Schmidt Dark of imported beers), Durban poison (a type of marijuana apparently, the internal rhyme here is "urban noise"), Black Nepalese.

CONCLUSION: Thirty days for the levels of illegalities detailed in this one seems light. So much for Nixon's promises on law and order.

Tuesday Tuneage
Various Artists - "Buy The World A Coke"
1971

On first viewing, I think I got the ending of Mad Men wrong. I thought after Don hugged Leonard - the not-stunningly-handsome, not-cool Dad stuck in a boring office job and an afterthought with his family (an average Don with zero moxie) - he embraced the om-om-om of the counterculture as the only thing keeping him from going off on a dismal, despaired, life-ruining bender. Peggy had told him he'd never get to work on Coke, and the last we saw of her she was intensely typing. Being a sucker for an image of a hard-working writer hammering out work, I figured she was typing up the script of the Coke ad that co-opted the very new age beliefs that Don had adopted.

But upon discussion with my brother and reading Meredith Blake's (they are always great) episode recap in the Los Angeles Times, it appears that Don was simply going with the flow at Big Sur in order to cunningly find a way to work on Coke after all. That is a better explanation of the smile that appears on his face at the end of the episode: He has found a way to turn this hippie-commune nightmare; where he is abandonded by the only person who is tied to his Dick Whitman past, a person he genuinely tried to help, into an iconic ad. Always the ad man, that Draper.

During one of its revivals on TV years ago, a friend said that the "Buy The World A Coke" song is great. I disagreed, with that weary purist mentality that something appearing in a commercial is automatically not "real" and hence inferior. Then after hearing it again with fresh ears and an open mind, I agreed with him. It is a great song. Turns out it was written in part by the same guys who wrote The Hollies hit "Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress" and (even better) the "If You've Got The Time" jingle for Miller Beer.

Hats off to all the folks behind Mad Men, it was quite the run. For a few weeks a year, that Sunday-night-creep, I-don't-want-to-go-to-school feeling was banished. On a kinda-related note, I saw an Alison Brie doppelganger in south Minneapolis last week. Same walk, same legs that we see Trudy Campbell sporting as she gets on the Learjet. Yessir.

Tuesday Tuneage
Various Artists - Melrose Place: The Music
1994

Polygraph Operator: Did Kimberly steal Jo's baby?
Jerry: I don't know.
Polygraph Operator: Did Billy sleep with Alison's best friend?
Jerry: I don't know.
Polygraph Operator: Did Jane's fiance kidnap Sydney and take her to Las Vegas? And if so, did she enjoy it?
Jerry: I don't know.
Polygraph Operator: Did Jane sleep with Michael again?
Jerry: Yes! That stupid idiot! He left her for Kimberly, he slept with her sister! He tricked her into giving him half her business, and then she goes ahead and sleeps with him again! I mean she's crazy! How could she do something like that? Oh that Jane, she makes me so mad!
  - Seinfeld

Of course I watched Melrose Place. It was quite a bit of fun there for a few years and the first half of its run was on while I was working some soul-draining corporate job and any escapism on the tube at night was a welcome relief. I wish I could say I bought Melrose Place: The Music used at Let It Be during one of my runs there late mornings while on the (morning break) lam from the Young-Quinlan Building, but the sticker on my jewel case indicates it was bought used at the Electric Fetus in the late nineties, when I was free. I'm sure I bought it almost solely for the Paul Westerberg track that ends it. A few weeks ago on an impulse, I put this album on my phone and gave it a full listen. Verdict:

Aimee Mann, "That's Just What You Are" - A perfect pop gem makes a heady leadoff track. Prior to this song being on the radio, I was vaguely aware of Mann and this one burned a way straight to my heart. For some bizarre reason, a coworker at the time was slightly offended that Mann had albums titled Whatever and I'm With Stupid, but those just seal the deal between her and Generation X.

Urge Overkill, "Back On Me" - This song is certainly solid, though it doesn't have the same exuberance as songs like "Sister Havana" and "Postive Bleeding". These tunes were all on their Saturation album. So, while Urge Overill didn't put one of their better songs on this soundtrack, they still managed to shill for their fan club in the liner notes! Love that.

Sam Phillips, "Baby I Can't Please You" - Phillips started out as a Christian rocker. A wag decades ago described Christian rock as simply "taking pop songs and inserting 'Jesus' where 'baby' normally goes." Good thing Phillips moved into the secular, so this song wasn't "Jesus I Can't Please You". I could listen to the percussion on this one all day long, plus it makes me want to read Peter Guralnick's "Sam Phillips Talking". (Different person, but still great art.)

Dinosaur Jr, "Blah" - The ultimate slacker rock, naming your song "Blah". The recurring guitar riff is intriguing, plus J Mascis sounds like he's trying to emote or somesuch. That's gotta count for something. (Or maybe he's just riffing on he and his band's disdain for punctuation.)

Frente!, "Ordinary Angels" - They/she/whoever have an exclamation point on their name. Mr. Lippman would not approve.

Annie Lennox, "Precious" - She's got great pipes, but this one is overproduced and it bores me.

Divinyls, "I'm Jealous" - Holy moly, I'm glad I dug this album out of the archives. While the guitars on this alone are worth the price of admission, this is also a perfectly produced psychodrama worthy of Roy Orbison.

Seed, "Kids … This is Fabulon" - Dumb band name. Dumb song name. Interesting Hammond B-3 though … who are these guys again? They certainly aren't The Seeds, those American heroes who were so punk that they earned the epitaph: "Two great chords - five great albums!" The Trouser Press Guide To '90s Rock describes Seed's sound as "a yeoman's mish-mash of 60's effluvia, '70s genericsm, '80s heartland-grunge and '90s faux-funk weirdness." It also says they have another song that "falls somewhere between Blind Melon and Boston." Wish THAT one had been on this album.

Letters To Cleo, "Here And Now" - Admit it -  the first time this song aired on your favorite alternative rock station, your immediate reaction was: "How are Beavis and Butt-head going to react to this one?"

James, "How Was It For You" - Not as annoying as their hit "Laid" (the one where the singer shrieks like he's doing a show tune), which still plagues the Jack FM playlist. This one is utterly devoid of soul or grit. Sounds like rock, but it ain't rock 'n' roll. A typical mid-nineties Brit-dork mediocrity that was of course embraced in certain Anglophile circles.

Paul Westerberg, "A Star Is Bored" - Typical Westerberg: He writes an acoustic masterpiece, records it in his Minneapolis basement, then mails it to his producer's house in Los Angeles for him to mix and add to the gorgeous backing vocals. Also Westerbergian: He makes you wonder what exactly is going on with the lyric's protagonist, then slaps a classic Paul Pun on the song title/chorus. A fitting closer to an album I had mostly forgotten and dismissed ("oh yeah, that's the one with that great Westerberg song on it"). This album states the case for second chances everywhere.

Tuesday Tuneage
Sir Lord Baltimore - "Helium Head (I Got A Love)"
1970

PART I: POSITIVELY 34TH STREET

see, this is how it's playing
everybody's going on about
all these sincere, earnest scams
in music, but I don't want no
folk revival, bluegrass gives me
the creeps. Trying to enjoy a book at
the coffee shop, the PA is playing
some hoary crap from youngsters
 - banjos and stringed instruments without
   amplification and some twentysomething
   bum trying to sound old -

And there's no relief at home,
sheesh I'm trying to focus on this
hockey game or at least on Kathryn Tappen
(woo-woo) and
somebody on Twitter
was going on about John Hiatt.
Who has always been a
Grade-A Bore, and it all piles up and it
all grates and I just want to focus,
get a clear head without all this
earnest, sincere music boring the daylights
out of me so the only known answer/cure involves:
A) headphones, B) Tullamore Dew, and
3) metal metal metal.

PART II: TRY IT

Electric guitars go from ear to ear like in "Whole Lotta Love." A singer who sounds insincere as hell (yeah!), then some monk-drone sounds like the Yardbirds' "Still I'm Sad" but not weighing anything down. More guitar freneticism. Crazyman lead singer goes on about how he's got a love, more monk sounds (did these guys ever correspond with Uriah Heep?) and bashing and a shriek and a freakout akin to the Yardbirds (them again) in "I'm a Man". John Fucking Hiatt you say? I'll take a handshake of reds instead, please.

Tuesday Tuneage

Led Zeppelin - "Immigrant Song"

1970

Walhalla

again ascend into the heavens

again get lost in words

again write, don't speak

again notebook, again pen

Tuesday Tuneage
Donnie Iris - "Love Is Like A Rock"
1982

"Love Is Like A Rock" is a gem that's almost as awe-inducing as Donnie Iris's "Ah Leah!" from the prior year, it strips down that single's bubblegum-metal into a simple-yet-tasty mix of chants, disco/metal guitar riffing, and a killer chorus. The background singers feat of pulling off multiple miracles in this one - to wit: 1) shouting "hey!", 2) starting the chorus, 3) sliding into "ahhhhhh…" mode, and 4) gleefully finishing the chorus - is in every way remarkable. Plus there's a drum break for you to bust moves to. The tune ends in an extended mix that was likely just put together by producer/keyboardist Mark Avsec using loops. ("You can leave, guys. See you at the bar in an hour.") Being a Bubblegum Statement of Purpose, it has no "meaning" - you could argues it's a lessons-not-learned-from-authority-figures followup to The Who's "The Real Me" - but mentally I keep trying to tie it to the wise Finnish proverb that states: "Love Is A Potato."

Tuesday Tuneage
Michael Jackson - “Billie Jean”
1982

Distractions can stop a writing habit cold. In my case recently it was Saturdays delayed with sports; there was the NCHC tourney, then the NCAA regionals, then the hoops semis, all weaved into this was a desire to go for a long walk late Saturday afternoons because Sundays were similarly sports-booked and a weekend walk clears the mind so effectively. So out the window went the 6 pm scotch-and-writing that is the crucial approach shot to get Tuesday Tuneage done. In fact, many times ninety percent of the work is complete in that late afternoon/early eve rush before hockey faces off on Saturday night, then left for final clean-up and posting on Tuesday.

So last week, I thought hey I’ll just take the laptop to the coffee shop Tuesday afternoon, load up on caffeine, and hammer out a Tuesday Tuneage in ninety minutes or so. That’s how I started them in the early days five years ago. But then on Tuesday, some utility workers outside of my building started work on replacing a telephone poll and woke me up with truck-beeping about ninety minutes before I normally wake up. And I am not a morning person, so early rising does not mean an early mental start. When the utility guys ended up disconnecting the electricity for what they said would be two hours, I figured I'd walk over to Our Diner on 36th and Bryant and get a huge ol’ breakfast prior to heading over to the coffee shop, and set things in place for what could be quality time with my laptop. At the coffee shop I decided to read first to get my mind loosened up. I was enjoying a great science fiction story on my phone, when some gal took a table a couple of down from mine with her two little kids. Needless to say these kids were noisy. They cried, they whined, they demanded. For the life of me, I don’t understand why people feel the need to be Cool Parents and take their kids to the neighborhood coffee shop. Take your little noisemakers to McDonald’s where they belong. Why ruin our workplace?

So I pounded my coffee, booked it home, finished that short story on my phone, and took a nap to try to claim back some of the sleep that had been taken from me that morning. Then it was time for a workout (breakfast was about 900 calories, oof), time to read the paper, time for dinner, time to watch hockey, time to watch The Sopranos. And that was Tuesday.

I play a system. The system dictates that time spent on Tuesdays and Saturdays is when these blog posts get written. When the system is disrupted, I cannot adapt quickly.

Because even if things are in place to finish Tuesday Tuneage at the coffee shop, The System applies in micro also. I must set quite the scene when I approach the little table at the local coffee shop. First, I make sure the table is set so the wide side faces me and not the short side. This is so that if I am typing notes, there is room for my notebook to sit next to the laptop while also leaving room for the all-important mug of coffee. Then hang my jacket on the other chair, make sure the collar isn’t sticking up in some funny fashion and place my UND hockey hat on the table so that the brim is facing out towards the public. Get all the necessary tools out of the bookbag, then make sure the bookbag sits on the other chair comfy and isn’t about to tip over. Then the chair I sit in has got to be right. Sure, they all look the same but some of them wobble and (worse) some of them have flat backs rather than the curved ones where my back fits comfy into. Hard to concentrate when I’m constantly distracted by worries of back pain. After all this, I can sit down to work on writing.

What does any of this have to do with “Billie Jean”? Well it goes back to a bit from the early days of David Letterman’s Late Night show on NBC. There was a claim floating about that in the song's chorus it sounds like Michael Jackson sings “that chair is not my son.” So Letterman played a clip of the song, and his crew so deliberately overdubbed an announcer voice saying “CHAIR” into the chorus it was so dumb it was hilarious. Every time I hear “Billie Jean” on Jack FM (which is frequently, which is great, because it is an awesome, timeless song), in my mind at some point I sing “CHAIR”. And for me to write effectively, chairs everywhere - literal ones, figurative ones - must be in their correct places. And that is (one of the many reasons) why there hasn’t been a Tuesday Tuneage in three weeks.

Tuesday Tuneage
The J. Geils Band - "Come Back"
1980

On their way from a gallant attempt at being America's Stones - funny, swaggering, revivalists of classic blues, R&B, and soul  - to not-quite new wave (but certainly not the blues) hitmakers extraordinaire (shorthand: from guitars and harp to synths and guitars), The J. Geils Band released the Love Stinks album which points both forward and back.

"Come Back" is a dance marvel, co-writer Seth Justman does mainstream synth work up there with seventies masters Pete Townshend and Stevie Wonder, and his production is flawless. When other co-writer Peter Wolf enters the chorus after the instrumental break, the background singers' stuttering is an amazing thing, one of those great rare pop touches. The extended coda makes me think/demand that there be an extended play twelve-inch dance mix out there somewhere. Disco never, ever died. Always remember that.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Hellacopters - "Gimmie Shelter"
1998

Leave it to garage hard rockers The Hellacopters to open their take on "Gimmie Shelter" by sounding as ominous as the original, then throw it into high gear around the 30-second mark and play the hell out of the thing like their Swedish lives depended on it. The punk/metal "speed it up to make it something unique" trick works, much to their credit. They own this one, complete with tough/freakout vocals, Stooges-like piano, frequent pick slides, harmonica wailing at the end, and somewhere in all of it a "Satisfaction" riff as well. Covers of classics don't get much more daring or better than this.

That they tucked it away on a B-side and later on a stuff-that-didn't-make-albums compilation titled Cream Of The Crap! only shows the (earned) arrogance with which the 'Copters carried themselves during their run. The next time that Microsoft anthem  "Start Me Up" pops up on your classic hits station, play this one instead LOUDLY.

Tuesday Tuneage
Uriah Heep - "Bird Of Prey"
1971

Some fifty-cent LPs you regret, most you don't. IT WAS ONLY FIFTY CENTS. Scoring The Best of Uriah Heep at the closeout sale at St. Paul's legendary Root Cellar Records back in '04 was arguably the best Kennedy coin gamble I've ever taken on a slab of vinyl. Uriah Heep was from the same Brit/heavy/metal cloth as Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. Like Sabbath they had some mystic occult mumbo jumbo going on, like Purple they had an organ and over-the-top vocals. Me, I eat this stuff up. Speed it up and substitute a lower-range vocal grumble and you have Screaming Trees, who I also love. Also, with Heep putting short songs on the A-side and longer (but not deeper) songs on the flip, I have almost all the Heep I need* in a single album.

And if you're going to buy The Best of Uriah Heep, you gotta get it on vinyl. The back cover features a handy chart that shows who was in/out of the band during its run. And that was in 1976 - early in Heep's run, it turns out - the folks over at Wikipedia were helpful enough to show in/out to present day. You are forgiven if you mix that chart up with the chart detailing the Lutheran Laestadian Divisions in America.

* "Almost" is the key word here. Weirdly, Uriah Heep's best song by far - "Stealin'" - is not included in this package!