Category: Music

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Music

For Your Listening Pleasure

I’m extremely busy this week (two major product launches at work), so I present to you some audio from my collection…

Picking Up Girls Made Easy

Three tracks from the classic 1970s self-help cassette by Eric Weber titled Picking Up Girls Made Easy. I posted The Walking the Dog Pick Up back in June; I’ve included the other two tracks I have from this (unintentionally) hilarious tape:

I

downsampled these and changed them from stereo to mono to shrink the

file sizes; email me if you’d like to get the full-sized versions in

their hi-fi glory.

It’s a Sin (To Tell a Lie)

Also in the “Why the hell was this ever recorded?” category is Brent Spiner (you know him better as “Data” from Star Trek: The Next Generation) singing a barbershop quartet-ish number called It’s a Sin (To Tell a Lie)

[3.8 MB MP3]. What  really makes the number is Patrick Stewart

(you lnow him better as “Captain Jean-Luc Picard“) doing the narrative

over the instrumental section.

Categories
Music Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

This Weekend: "Top Gun! The Musical"

Colin Viebrock, whom I know through PHP development and other professional channels has an interesting non-programming project: he’s the director of Top Gun! The Musical.

Here’s a quick synopsis from the Top Gun! The Musical site:

Singing. Satire. Subtext. All at Mach 3! If you see only one musical

comedy about mounting a mega-musical based on the movie Top Gun, make

it Top Gun! The Musical. You’ll laugh. You’ll hum. You’ll believe

a jet can fly!

For anyone who’s ever cringed through Cats, felt the need for speed, or

wondered “who thought that would be a good idea?”, comes this

new satirical musical. Writer Billy Palmer is about to crash and burn.

His musical adaptation of Top Gun is going off the rails and he really

needs a hit … especially after the debacle of Apocalypse Wow!

Instead, he’s saddled with a quarrelling cast, a shady ex-Navy SEAL

producer, and a bit of bad luck. Now if only everyone would stop singing!

Although Top Gun! The Musical has received plenty of critical acclaim

and good “word-of-mouth”, I never got it together to actually go catch

a show…until now. Colin informs me that they’ve been invited to

perform at the first annual New York Musical Festival, and they’ll be doing a couple of perfomances this weekend in order to warm up for the New York shows. You can see Top Gun! The Musical at the Robert Gill Theatre (214 College Street

at St. George Street — 3rd floor, enter off of St. George Street) this

Friday and Saturday. Both performances start at 8:00 p.m. and tickets

are $20.00.

I’m thinking of catching the Friday performance. Who wants to be my wingmen?

Bonus trivia link: Top Gun quotes!

Categories
In the News Music

This is Where All the Dave Matthews Band Fans Get On My Case

I don’t see why people are so surprised about the incident in which the Dave Matthews Band’s tourbus ended up dumping its toilet contents onto a boat full of tourists.

It’s just a more literal form of what they’ve been doing to us with their music.

And at least you can wash off the crap.

Categories
Music

Homemade Nirvana Flash Video

When MTV and MuchMusic
debuted, I remember some people complaining that what was shown in
music videos often had nothing to do with the song or that they
imagined comepletey different visuals for the song. With the rise of
cheap and plentiful broadband, good audio compression and tools like
Flash, making your own video for your favourite songs is easier than
ever.

Indie artists often don’t have the money to make videos (which means
that they also don’t have the money to hire lawyers to hand out
cease-and-desist nastygrams), so a good number of these homemade videos
are for songs that wouldn’t otherwise have them. Notable ones
include  Wesley Willis’ Merry Christmas and geek troubador MJ Hibbett’s ode to computers of the 1980s, Hey Hey 16K (which I first mentioned in this entry).

The threat of lawsuits doesn’t stop everyone, however — especially if
they live in places where the observation of copyright is a little,
shall we say, relaxed. A Chinese site whose URL I can’t find has a
number of videos, most of them dreadfully bad, save for this video of Nirvana’s Dumb.
I rather like the artist’s cartoony renditions of Kurt, Krist and Dave;
if Nirvana had a Saturday morning cartoon show just like one of their
chart contemporaries, they’d probably be drawn like this.

Categories
It Happened to Me Music

Where the action is

It’s all in the comments section of the
post in which I ask people to list some “must-know” Canadian rock and
pop tunes from the 80s and 90s that never made it outside our borders. Check it out.

Categories
It Happened to Me Music

What My Lunch Break Looks and Sounds Like

I bring my lunch to work most days, but once a week I like to go out
for it. One of the lunch spots in Liberty Village (the former stomping grounds of a reasonably well-known blogger, internet/copyright freedom agitator and science fiction author) the neighbourhood
where Tucows is located, is the Warehouse Grill. The food’s quite good
(they make a really mean calamari) and on Thursdays, they have live
jazz on the patio. Here’s a movie [1.8MB QuickTime] that I shot a couple of Thursdays ago, featuring my co-workers Scott and Darryl at the beginning.

Categories
It Happened to Me Music

“Must-Know” Canadian Tunes?

The two weddings that I’ve attended with Wendy have both been for
Canadians of my generation, which meant that the DJ played Spirit of the West’s Home for a Rest (a song where they managed to beat The Pogues on their own turf) and a couple of
big hits that she didn’t recognize. I’ve decided to give her a hand by
making her a mixed CD of the essential Canadian rock and pop tunes for
people out age (specifically people who went to high school in the
mid-to-late eighties and university in the late eighties to
mid-nineties).

So far, I’ve come up with:

I need more songs! If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments. Some guidelines:

  • The
    songs should have been hits only within the borders of Canada, or even
    my area of Canada (Ontario/Quebec). There’s no point in putting Tom
    Cochrane’s Life is a Highway or Bryan Adams’ Summer of ’69 on this CD;
    the point is to give her music that’s new to her.
  • The term
    “hit” is relative. It the song had a cult following in my neck of the
    woods (say, a hit in the Ontario/Quebec university zone in the early
    90s but unknown in New England), it counts.
  • More than one song by the same artist is okay.

Oh, and could someone tell me if the Dream Warriors‘ My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style was or wasn’t a hit in the Excited States? It did well here in Ontario and was also a minor club hit in the UK.

Your suggestions, please…