VINYL - Andy Williams "Holly"

The first "grown up" (i.e. non-Disney) record album was Love, Andy. I probably played that thing raw on my little portable record player. I used to grouse to my parents about having not been alive to watch his TV show, especially when Lawrence Welk was on. I had kind of an easy listening childhood.

Today I woke up to the news that Andy Williams died yesterday. "Holly" was always my favorite song, even though I was too young to really grasp its tone of wistfulness and regret. I just thought it was pretty, and that Holly was a very lucky girl.

Andy Williams was my first celebrity crush. I pretended to like Shaun Cassidy and Andy Gibb the better to fit in with my peers, but when I came home from elementary school and wanted to listen to something dreamy, it was Andy, every time.

So today is a very, very sad day.

VINYL - Frank Zappa's "You Didn't Try to Call Me"

Many thanks to the brilliant Walter Hawn for the heads up about this new-to-me track. It has everything I love Frank Zappa for -- bizarre and quirky lyrics, complex instrumentation that still manages to sound like good old stripped-down rock'n'roll, and just a hint of sentimentality.

Zappa comes off as a condescending jerk sometimes, but all is always forgiven for the way he tickles my brain and my earholes. I speak in the present tense, for he is with us always in the grooves of vinyl and memories of the first time we heard something like Lumpy Gravy and demanded to know: "What the Snape was that?"

Back in my extra-contrarian twenties, when I was a state Libertarian Party official in Massachusetts, I kept lobbying the rest of the crew to get bumper stickers made up that read "Frank Zappa: He may be dead, but he'd still make a better president than you."

VINYL - Willie Nelson "The Sound In Your Mind"

I just had a crazy dream which I absolutely blame on Tamaranorbust and Jeff Gordinier. And on all the cold medicine I've been having to take this week. In it, my high school band teacher, who was absolutely this kind of guy, had assigned us to listen to an album side a day on vinyl and note down our thoughts on it for something we had to hand in at the end of the year. For my first album side I chose Willie Nelson's The Sound in Your Mind off of which the song in the [VINYL] video embedded above was a single, which somehow had transported itself into my parents' record collection in that way things do in dreams (in real life, I don't think my parents ever had any Willie Nelson -- even before his braids and tax problems, he wasn't really their style. Just a hippie who played country instead of psychedelic rock). I woke up really, really wanting to do my band homework!

Alas, I don't have a turntable or any vinyl anymore. I have plenty of vices taking up plenty of space in my house, but analog audio collecting hasn't ever been one of them. But then I remembered how the world's favorite jukebox, YouTube, features rather a lot of videos like this one, of someone playing an analog vinyl favorite with the camera just focused on the turntable. It's a whole thing that I've only peripherally noticed and appreciated as a sort of protest against Mp3s, which my readers are all pretty much the sort of people who know are compressed to hell and sound terrible compared even to audio CDs, which themselves sound pretty awful compared to vinyl, but yannow.

Anyway, so I really liked the idea of a time-compressed version of that band homework (not sure how many of us have time to listen to a whole album side every day as busy grown-ups), so I thought of doing it this way, and blogging it, for a while, just as an experiment.

Furthermore, rather than impose just my tastes on everybody, I thought maybe I'd open up the floor to suggestions for tracks to include this way. Maybe if it turns out to be something I like I'll spin it off as a separate blog, but for now, just think of it as another KateOfMind.

Hook up your computer to the best speakers you've got in the house (me, I've got some Harmon Kardon Soundsticks, which aren't exactly my brothaman's giant vintage Monsoons, but have always served this non-audiophile's purpose well enough) and give this tune a spin.