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| Except for Germany, that is. |
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| W had the same faraway look as we tallied the victory points |
Game: Imperial
Location: K
Choice: G
Game One:
G(113pts), J(87pts), K(82pts), S(77pts) & W(75pts)
Final Tally:
G was declared victor for this week.
Notes:
- Italy was the first country to reach 25 points
- England was the worst run country
- Before the game began, W was asked if he would like to swap starting flags from Germany to England. His reply: "What does it matter? I'm still going to lose this fucking game?"
- To the shock of all participants, one of us revealed that he cries every time he watches Disney's Frozen. He also wept at Disney on ice. He's a crier.
- Possible non-canon game this coming Saturday
Music Features
Frank Zappa: Over-Nite Sensation (1973)
Love it or hate it, Over-Nite Sensation was a watershed album for Frank Zappa, the point where his post-'60s aesthetic was truly established; it became his second gold album, and most of these songs became staples of his live shows for years to come.
Whereas the Flo and Eddie years were dominated by rambling, off-color comedy routines, Over-Nite Sensation tightened up the song structures and tucked sexual and social humor into melodic, technically accomplished heavy guitar rock with jazzy chord changes and funky rhythms; meanwhile, Zappa's growling new post-accident voice takes over the storytelling.
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| Frank always dressed up for games of Imperial |
While the music is some of Zappa's most accessible, the apparent callousness and/or stunning sexual explicitness of "Camarillo Brillo," "Dirty Love," and especially "Dinah-Moe Humm" leave him on shaky aesthetic ground. Zappa often protested that the charges of misogyny leveled at such material missed out on the implicit satire of male stupidity, and also confirmed intellectuals' self-conscious reticence about indulging in dumb fun; however, the glee in his voice as he spins his adolescent fantasies can undermine his point. Indeed, that enjoyment, also evident in the silly wordplay, suggests that Zappa is throwing his juvenile crassness in the face of critical expectation, asserting his right to follow his muse even if it leads him into blatant stupidity (ironic or otherwise).
One can read this motif into the absurd shaggy-dog story of a dental floss rancher in "Montana," the album's indisputable highlight, which features amazing, uncredited vocal backing from Tina Turner and the Ikettes. As with much of Zappa's best '70s and '80s material, Over-Nite Sensation could be perceived as ideologically problematic (if you haven't got the constitution for FZ's humor), but musically, it's terrific.
(from AllMusic.com May 2015)
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| Fred Eaglesmith wouldn't make W cry |
G's Folk Mix: Fall '06 Vol. 1
Included tunes from several artists that have played Blue Skies Music Festival. Some highlights:
Ian Tamblyn's Vancouver Island Song, Fred Eaglesmith's Cumberland County, Ani Difranco, Roy Harper, Greg Brown, Chuck Brodsky & Bruce Cockburn covering Mississippi John Hurt
The Grateful Dead: Two from the Vault (Recorded August 1968)
What I've always liked about the Dead is their willingness to take chances, to screw up in public and on record. To paraphrase Miles Davis, if you're not making mistakes, you're not making music.
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| Seriously, why isn't this a rule? |
Live Dead, the classic 1960s Grateful Dead concert album, was so good it became a bit of a problem for the band. In an interview years later, lead guitarist Jerry Garcia griped good-naturedly about how the version of "Dark Star" on that album became, for a while, the version for record-oriented Deadheads nonplussed by the Dead's wildly varying performances of the tune. That concert was one moment in time, Garcia said (and I paraphrase), never to be repeated. After all, if the Dead are about anything, they're about improvisation.
Well, yes and no. Two from the Vault, recorded on two August nights in 1968, roughly the same era as Live Dead and the same songlist (with additions from Anthem of the Sun), proves at once how much mileage the Dead could get out of the same handful of tunes, and just how much variety they could come up with without changing the arrangements a bit.
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| Same thing happened to me once. well, more than once actually... |
Reading between the lines of producer Dan Healy's lengthy technical notes, I get the strong hunch that a number of Vault 2's versions of the '68 set list—particularly of "The Eleven," "Death Don't Have No Mercy," and "Turn On Your Lovelight"—would have made it on to Live Dead had the technology then been available to salvage tapes which have only recently been rendered usable.
Healy tells a fascinating story of conservative engineers from Warner Bros. (the Dead's label at the time) not trusting Healy, et al, with Warner's fancy new 8-track recording equipment. "The engineers they sent to us were accustomed to recording Big Band style and were not familiar with Rock & Roll close microphone techniques." Warners used a small number of mikes placed at considerable distances: vocal and audience mikes combined, each drumkit premixed to a single track, etc. Healy's challenges were those of "severe phase cancellation and time smear that reduced the time image to nothing." Using a B&K 2032 FFT analyzer and TC1280 delay units, Healy and Don Pearson were able to individually delay each of the tracks to compensate for their different mike distances, the result being a convincing semblance of "a nearly perfect stereo image." Think of that: the term "stereo image" discussed by a rock engineer. Amazing.
After all that, Two from the Vault sounds a lot like Live Dead, but with a less digitally friendly high end. Besides, two of the things I always enjoyed about early Dead albums were the natural dynamics and that distant drum miking; the drums sounded like real, homemade, wooden instruments, even if kickdrum went missing.
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