Category Archives: Music

Eagles concert

Posted on by

The Eagles provided the soundtrack for an important period in my life. Equally true, I assume, for others in the audience at last night’s Eagles concert. A lady sitting near us wasn’t born when the Eagles hit it big, but grew up listening with her parents.

The boys had to strain to hit a few of the notes but the memories were picture perfect. I like to think it’s more than Boomer nostalgia that keeps filling auditoriums for Stones and Eagles concerts. Which of today’s big artists will still be filling the seats in thirty years?

This photo was taken from the Cessna 350 as we flew over. But I’m not really complaining. We could see the jumbotron screens and music was loud enough, even from a couple of thousand feet.

It was a good show. The guitar licks alone would have been worth the price of the ticket.

30 year old party pic selected for Fists cover

Posted on by

“This is a bit of a strange request. My name is James Finlay and I’m in a band called ‘Fists’ who’re based in Nottingham, England. We make ramshackle-y, lo-fi pop music and are about to release our debut 7” single on a small independent record label (also based in Nottingham) called Hello Thor (not much on their web page at the moment unfortunately)

The reason I’m mailing you is because everybody in our band has become obsessed with your Flickr photo set for the Basement Diaries blog and we wanted to find out if you would be willing to grant us permission to use one of your photos for the cover of our single? We’re releasing the single as a download on iTunes and as a strictly limited edition vinyl pressing of 500 copies. Naturally we would credit you for the photo on the record, we would obviously send you over some copies too and we could also offer some money as well but are pretty limited financially as we’re a small DIY operation who is paying for almost everything ourselves from our day jobs.

The photo we’d love to use if possible is the one of the gorilla in boxing gloves taken at a Halloween Party in (1980). We love the grainy 35mm quality, the colour palette and the sense of fun and mystery. The song we’re releasing is called ‘Cockatoo’ (I’d be very happy to send you an MP3 of this so you can have a listen and decide if you think it’s appropriate). Thematically it’s about fantasies of freedom and escape as seen through the eyes of a caged bird (the ‘Cockatoo’ of the title). Obviously this doesn’t really have any obvious relationship with the photo particularly but I don’t think that matters too much. If you are happy to let us use it we’d obviously send you over the design before we got the covers made up for approval.

If you’re not interested then no worries and thanks so much for your time and also for sharing the photos in the first place. If there’s anything else you’d like to know first then please give me a shout.”

Kind regards,
James

This is what I love most about the web. The man behind the gorilla mask is Barb’s brother, Lew. Don’t recall who is sitting the chair. And I’m pretty sure the beer is a Stag (shudder).

Stand By Me (Playing for Change)

Posted on by

From the award-winning documentary, Playing For Change: Peace Through Music, comes the first of many songs around the world being released independently. Featured is a cover of the Ben E. King classic by musicians around the world adding their part to the song as it traveled the globe. This and other songs such as One Love will be released as digital downloads soon; followed by the film soundtrack and DVD early next year.

Sharing music

Posted on by

We were listening to some new tunes on Roger’s iPod as we drove back to Jeff City from Columbia. Like most new cars, his has an input jack for the iPod (or whatever). So it was easy for me to pull out my nano [insert joke here], plug in and play one of my tunes.

As we listened, it occurred to me this simple act couldn’t happen in a pre-iPod world, at least not easily. Yeah, I guess I could have had a pocket-full of cassettes or CD’s, but Roger and I had thousands of songs between us and we thought nothing of switching from his iPod to mine.

Cb011960My old pal RP was an avid collector of 45 rpm records. He had big cardboard boxes jammed with “singles.” The best we could do back then was stack 20 or so on a fat little spindle that would drop the next 45 down to the turntable. Shuffle? Sure, like a deck of cards.

I seem to recall RP telling me he had copied all of his 45’s to CD. Don’t know if he’s made the final leap to an iPod.

It’s hard to imagine what’s next but even hard to imagine there won’t be a “next.”