Showing posts with label Janis Joplin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Janis Joplin. Show all posts

Friday 24 July 2020

A Box of Pearls and Earth, Wind and Fire


Yesterday I put my contact lens in and one popped out onto the floor. I spent an age to no avail looking for it. I then looked at something and realised that the vision in the eye where I thought I'd lost the lens was fine, the lens obviously hadn't dropped out although I thought it had.

Today is very grey and quiet and I feel I am getting hit with SAD but that will pass , though it does make me worry for people who feel like this all the time. I am glad that the first link that came up was an NHS one rather than Wikipedia.

Anyway to the point of the post, since my return to listening CDs I have been working my way through various box set and yesterday I finished Janis Joplin's (with Big Brother & The Holding Company) set "Box of Pearls" which is 5CDs but are quite short , from 20 minutes for the five song rarities to sixty minutes for the "Kozmic Blues" album. All high quality blues and soul with some extras. Some of the brass arrangements are really good , and Janis' voice , is well , you know what it is. we will use "Piece of My Heart" as the song for this post , but there could have been so many more.

The next box was "The Eternal Dance" by Earth, Wind and Fire , which is , like the "Box of Pearls" , a beautiful Sony Legacy box set , and while Earth, Wind and Fire are great musicians and very impressive on stage, most of the music is bland faceless soul in my book , with the odd decent song , but the live cuts get an amazing response. It may be a while before I hit this three disc set again, but for fans it should be a must have.

Today I dug out "Irish Ways" by Ron Kavana , and this is the first time I have listened to this , and it is an eductional history of Ireland with dialogue , song , poetry and music, almost a five hour documentary to listen to while I work. I would highly recommend it to anyone if you have the time to take it all in. I discovered a hell of a lot I didn't know about Ireland.

I still have many boxes to go through so expect more similar posts while I am working from home.

Tuesday 21 July 2020

Apple Venus


Although I am doing a minor cull of my CD collection on my Discogs Store over the last week , while working from home , I have started playing CDs again. Part of the reason is that 6Music during the day is ranging from bland to techno with not much in between. Playing CDs means that I can choose what I want to play.

The main criteria in that the CD is to hand.

This morning I kicked off with "On The Beach" by Neil Young , then 40 minutes later I picked up "The Apple Box" by XTC . This is a box and booklet with the albums "Apple Venus" and "Wasp Star" with accompanying demos albums "Homespun" and "Homegrown" . I wasn't sure that four CDs was a listening option , but I listened all the way through , the albums then the demos , and basically that was an excellent day's listening.

I will share "Stupidly Happy" from "Wasp Star" with you , like many XTC songs , it is highly infectious and uplifting.

Having easily listened through this , I am now eying my other boxes for my music while I work this week such as Public Image's "Metal Box" , "Box of Pearls" by Janis Joplin and "Anthologia" by John Cooper Clarke , this week will be a personal treasure rediscovery.

Sunday 4 September 2016

It's Over

Thrills
The weekend is finished and it's time for work, or will be in a few hours. It's been an odd one for me, not really done much but I have rested, watched catch up TV and read quite a lot and written a few blog posts.

I had a rearrangement of my music and discovered a couple of effective duplicate CDs , Best Ofs The Faces and ELP , plus Janis Joplin's Pearl and Big Brother and The Holding Company's Cheap Thrills , all class albums but you only need one copy and the purchases of some excellent box sets have made them redundant.





I think I got the Joplin stuff from Music Zone in The Metro Centre , a now defunct music emporium, but we are lucky to have a decent number of music shops in Newcastle.


Anyway I will be dropping by a charity shop this week unless any of my friends want to improve their music collection and it's given me a chance to include The Faces That's All You Need , one of my favourite slide driven songs ever.

Sleep well my friends and have a brilliant week.