as I'd like to keep talking about the madness Down Under, I should get off the topic. There's so much crazy stuff going on everywhere that it's better to leave it festering in it's own cesspool for a while. It sure as hell will still be there if I go back to it in six months even.

Just now I got a text from my dentist telling me I have an appointment on October the 28th. I was expecting Gary to send me another picture of a bass. Since we're doing this musical get-together next month, he's sending me snaps of potential basses he might be playing. As long as it's not the Italian violin one. It looks great, but does't have much oomph, if you know what I mean. 

I've been getting texts from Rick the drummer as well. Since Jon quit the band, Rick has no way of getting here. Although he hasn't asked me to pick him up, he still wants to play even without a bass player. It's not something I want to do. A three piece band is about the limit of stripped back I feel comfortable with. Now he's telling me if we play at so and so, we can make this much money, and somewhere else, this much money. I think Rick needs to get himself some wheels before we can play anywhere.

Years ago I had a brief gig playing piano at the St George's Leagues club in Sydney's inner west. I had a book of about 20 songs that I had painstakingly written out, and I managed ok for a while. The problem was that some of the staff were getting distracted by my presence and the manager didn't like it. I wasn't unhappy that it came to an end. Solo performing is not my thing. I'm not a fucking minstrel who plays for tips. People only want to hear stuff they know anyway. The stuff they want to hear I don't want to know about.

A couple of nights ago I was listening to some vinyl records. There are hundreds of them in this house. At least half left behind by the previous owner. I found an early numbered copy of the Beatles White album, although it's not worth much. Musically it's not worth much either in my opinion. 

It's a double album for a start, and would have been much better if they had ditched half of the material and made it a single album. There's a lot of junk on this record. It's as if they had too much time and too much money to make it good. The absolute worst track would have to be "Rocky Raccoon", the Ringo one, being a close second. McCartney must cringe every time he hears that awful fake southern accent that he's attempting on the intro. 

Yeeesh! Some of the other Macca stuff is pretty ordinary as well. "Blackbird" while it is one of the best songs he wrote for that album, sounds like something Simon and Garfunkel would have written and sung.

The Lennon stuff seems disjointed and half assed. Flashes of brilliance are subsumed by the fact that it appears to be only a fraction of a half finished tune bolted on to another fraction of the same which results in an incomplete fully formed song. You can hear echoes of things to come from others however. I kept hearing early ELO in some of the arrangements, and of course Oasis regurgitates a lot of Beatles patina, especially the Lennon vocal style.

People have probably written books about this record, but I'm not going to. The Wikipedia entry goes for days, and looking at the track listing reminds me of things like the Manson cult followers, which I have little doubt were perhaps influenced not so much by the Helter Skelter track but by the George Harrison song "Piggies", which sounds like a Marxist fairy tale rhyme. It's pretty rich (if you'll pardon the pun) coming from a group that by that stage was a literal corporation, with offices, staff and the whole nine yards of capitalism at their disposal.

I could go on, but I won't.

I don't like vinyl much. I really like the way it sounds, but it's a pain in the ass to deal with. Records are heavy, and trying to find a track you like involves shuffling through piles of 12"

 covers requiring not a small amount of space to do it in. I would say at least half of the over 500 lps I have are things I wouldn't listen to. The problem is that you can't just delete them. It ain't that easy.

Good Day