Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

Alright. I have to do it. It's the most controversial album in my collection and i haven't listened to it in a looooong time. It's controversial because some of you i know love it, and some of you detest it with every fiber of your being. It's the sophomore album from Dave Matthews Band, Crash. No, that's not it. It's controversial because you gotta decide how to approach Boyd Tinsley and the sexual harassment settlement. Plus that, uh, unpleasant incident with his tour bus and a bridge and a guy who can certainly attest to the stink. I am Bottle, hear me squeamishly point out my past instances of separating the art from the person. I think it's fair to point out his coincidental involvement with the band from the beginning. Dave wanted a fiddle part on Tripping Billies, and Dave fired him many years later for said controversies 'cause Dave don't need that kind of headache. Mrs. Bottle hates it because she was subjected to it on the level of college ...

Tonight it's Ives. He proposed a Constitutional Amendment to let people directly draft legislation that Congress would cull and select for public referendum. Some say his first heart attack was brought on by a heated debate with FDR. Ives proposed issuing $50 bonds during the WWI effort and FDR, chairman of the committee, scoffed at the low value. He was going to hand out a pamphlet criticizing Too Much Politics in Our Representative Democracy at the 1920 Republican Convention, but the printer didn't finish them until the convention was over. He wrote music that no one wanted to perform during his life in his spare time, and paid for pretty much all his publications out of his own pocket. If it weren't for Copland, quite a few people would care a lot less today. He sounds like a kooky old lovable guy.  I won't bore you with descriptions of all 4 symphonies, but i will say that the world he sculpts in symphonic sounds is much more noble, playful, thoughtful, and downrigh...

The biggest problem with all the opinions i've heard today (and it's too many to count this morning) is that it's second hand repetition of reporting. I can tell the difference in your speech patterns if i've known you for a while. The second problem is that the train of logic starts off perfectly fine based on what people saw and heard, but quickly goes into the murky territory between intentionality and cosmic absurdity.  It's a very simple thing to come to the conclusion that the general shape of the day was planned and encouraged (it clearly was), but it's quite another thing to imply that a full acting troup spend the last 3 weeks choreographing it like Ocean's 11. That's TV brain talking through a delicious dopamine fantasy.  The reality is that no one knows how to act in the current hypersensitive state we all live in. So, some people act erratic, make small bad decisions that snowball into chaos, and everyone slips into a pure reactionary (unpred...

Hey Bottle. I deleted some of your stupid hasty and inaccurate posts. Thanks, Skip. You wanna do an album tonight? No, not really.  C'mon. I'm sure you've got one lined up. Why? Why bother? I'm too angry. I say things wrong when i'm angry. Then i have to apologize, and get everything back on track, and i'd rather just nip myself in the bud before it gets worse. Plus, my copy of STP's third album has some horrible disgusting goo on it. Spit polish? I hadn't even tried. Now Bottle, you were the one who said it's perfectly fine to be wrong or dumb as long as your brain didn't get messed up.  Yeah, i did. Well, you got two thumbs right? [Lick, wipe, wipe, insert, press play] Well what do you know? It worked. Dear Sen. Lankford, i was wrong to criticize your speech this evening. I took the liberty of being grateful that my editor deleted it, but i said it and i was so eager to crap on you that i just spiraled into insanity. I still say the senate need...

I don't know how you guys feel about it, but this 1987 recording of Mahler 1 is just the bees knees. I think i bought it at the Galleria in Dallas on a high school field trip.

And now, the exciting non-sequiter conclusion to our tale: Oh, wait, wait, wait. We didn't hear GREGORY'S take on Nevermind. What sayeth the skeleton from out the closet?  I THINK WE SHOULD HAVE A VISIT WITH MORTIMER.  Really? Like listening to Meatloaf's first album will just magically clear everything up? Preposterous! Ok, i like a challenge, Bat Out Of Hell in 3, 2, 1...  This one time Todd Rundgren thought he was making a spoof of a Bruce Springsteen album, so he did what anyone would do and hired half the E-Street band and Edgar Winter to play on it. And don't forget that play-by-play monologue from The Scooter. Lundgren legit thought the entire thing was hilarious.  Nobody wanted to publish this thing. I mean nobody. Every exec they pitched said "have any of you baffoons ever even heard a rock album before?!" That was kind of a problem considering they lied to Todd Rundgren, who had been paying people out of his own pocket this whole time.  You need some...

Are we closer to somewhere than we were before? Are we really chasing the Absurd like it's own own tail? Like everything, it depends on your goal.  I had no goal other than to just talk about Nevermind until i ran out of things to say. Mission accomplished. Took 3 days. 30 years of listening to it. It's mostly gibberish, and i'm perfectly happy with that. Next