Mopping up

PRINCE: Well, how 'bout him? He did some great stuff, though I wasn't that big a fan back in the day.
I played "Purple Rain" a couple times at work last Friday night. The first time through I got all sad and nostalgic, but the second time was pure exaltation. It always was a gorgeous song. And that guitar riff at the end keeps going round and round in my head....
I always loved "1999," too. "Kiss" and "When Doves Cry" have grown on me over the years. "Sometimes it Snows in April" is a nice low-key piece off of PARADE. "Anotherloverholeinyohead" is interesting, too, also from PARADE, sort of an echo of "When Doves Cry." Some of Prince's more sexually-oriented stuff was just too in-your-face for me, and I don't think I even HEARD him after about 1989....
I heard "I Wanna be Your Lover" for the first time EVER on the radio last Saturday night (it came out in like 1978), and it sounded good, cute, solid. The guy was obviously meant for bigger things. He had a great few years there, from '81 through about '86 or so.
This has sure been a bad year for musicians. Keith Emerson and Paul Kantner were the ones that hit me hardest, but this one was also a shock. No more for awhile, OK? (Sorry, no breaks -- blues guitarist Lonnie Mack died this past week, too. KPLU's "All Blues" ran one of Mack's songs, "Stop," which is pretty freakin' great....)

GOOD NEWS FOR SEATTLE-AREA ROCK FANS: "Little Steven's Underground Garage" is back, starting at 11 p.m. Pacific Time Sundays on KZOK-FM 102.5 (I assume they also stream over the Internet). In the three weeks they've been back around, Steven and friends have done a two-part salute to The British Invasion that included great stuff by second-tier bands like The Searchers, The Pretty Things and Creation, and a salute to The Ramones -- in the middle of which up popped The Ronettes' great "The Best Part of Breakin' Up." Steven didn't understand why that song only peaked at Number 39, either....

CHECK YOUR GOODWILLS!: In the past month-plus I've found an amazing amount of good CHEAP music and books at my four area Goodwill stores. The books would make too long a list, but the CD's I've bought (or at least seen) include half a dozen Beatles albums (ABBEY ROAD, WHITE ALBUM, SGT. PEPPER, REVOLVER, HELP!, PLEASE PLEASE ME, MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR), Van Morrison's MOONDANCE, ASTRAL WEEKS and BEST OF, Moody Blues' DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED, Todd Rundgren's SOMETHING/ANYTHING?, Al Green best-of, lots of later Bob Dylan, a brand-new solid eight-CD set of early-'60s folk music for a ridiculously low price, lots of various-artists hit-singles collections, TONS of '60s and '70s jazz (Miles, Coltrane, Mingus, etc.), some earlier jazz (Ellington, Louis Armstrong, etc.), Can's CANNIBALISM 1 best-of (how the HELL did that get here?), Prince's PURPLE RAIN and ULTIMATE best-of, RAMONESMANIA best-of, Sex Pistols' NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS, Clash's LONDON CALLING, Dave Edmunds' best-of, Rolling Stones' FORTY LICKS best-of and EXILE ON MAIN STREET, Santana best-of, lots of later Pat Metheny, and a whole lot more.
Course the vinyl bins are worthless -- that's all Jim Nabors and Ray Conniff, with only a VERY rare surprise....
I try to give my area stores at least a week to re-stock, and then I go hit 'em again. It seems to be all about the timing. Lately it's sure been paying off. If you're on a tight budget, you might want to check your local Goodwills out. They're practically GIVING this stuff away. But you probably already know this....

TELL ALL: Spent most of this past week re-reading former major-league pitcher Jim Bouton's excellent BALL FOUR (1970), which I seem to re-read about once every 20 years and get more out of each time. It's a hilarious, quick, easy read. And I'm not that big a baseball fan....
The first of the "tell-all" sports books, BALL FOUR was revolutionary because it treated professional baseball players not as the stainless All-American heroes they'd been held up as in the '60s and before, but as real men: They chased women, drank, partied, used performance-enhancing drugs, worried about their careers, didn't get paid enough (back in the stone age), had marriage and family problems, didn't always get along with each other, played hideous practical jokes on each other, and basically behaved with all the maturity you see at your average local high school. What a bunch of characters....
The baseball establishment was shocked, and more sports-tell-all books followed. Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn asked Bouton to sign a statement saying that he made the whole thing up. Bouton refused, and instead wrote a sequel, I'M GLAD YOU DIDN'T TAKE IT PERSONALLY. I'd like to find another copy of that, now. It's been years since I read it....