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The stress of work is leaking into my sleeping brain, causing nightmares beyond telling.  This one, though, is at least a little humorous.  The other night, I dreamt that I was the only person in the world who remembered a particular song from 1992, and I HAD to preserve that memory, no matter what. 

Now, the way I learned about this song in real life was interesting enough.  I was home from Grad School, and had a few bucks free to spend on stuff.  I had become the unofficial master of the mixtape for just about any party held by the theatre department, owing to my ginormous cassette collection, supplemented by a small but growing assortment of CDs.  Add in the collections of the two roomies, and I had a ridiculously eclectic range of music to play with.  There was only one problem: none of it was new.  I jumped on my folks' computer (a 386, maybe) and swear to god, connected to Prodigy.

THAT was cutting edge back then, folks.  Anyway, I headed to some of the message boards to ask for help... mostly for dance music.  I got a few good song titles back, including the track involved in my nightmare. 

Oh yeah, remember that?  The nightmare?  I woke up from it, thinking I REALLY WAS the only person in the world who remembered the song.  I stumbled into my living room and started going through my CDs, trying to find the maxi-single... and I couldn't find it.  The boxes in the closet didn't have it either.  Actually desperate now, I called up yourfaceinatube, hoping beyond hope that someone else out there knew the tune!  As it turned out, I need not have worried.

In fact, it was rather stupid of me to have been half-scared out of my wits; this was actually a Billboard Hot 100 hit, back when that meant something, and I KNEW that.  Of course people weren't going to have forgotten it.  Still, nightmares aren't supposed to make sense, are they?

And now, just in case something really DOES happen and everybody else forgets "Love U More" by Sunscreem, it'll be here.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:44 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Oh no!  Look out!  It's another installment of Saturday Night Tunage with your host, DJ Wonderduck!

It amazes me that I've managed to go seven months since the last one of these, or at least that's what the search feature says, but it does appear to be true!  I do believe that I've deprived you, my faithful readers/listeners, for much too long.  What you believe, on the other hand,  is up to you!  I make no promises that these songs haven't been featured before, but I don't much care... I like 'em all the same!  With all that out of the way, let's get on with the tunage!

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Posted by: Wonderduck at 05:26 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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1 The cover of Get Lucky works because of the cowbell.  


Okay, now to be more serious, it is a pretty good multimix cover.

Posted by: Tom Tjarks at July 21, 2013 10:34 AM (qE66L)

2 I thought it was the airhorn, m'self.

Posted by: Wonderduck at July 21, 2013 10:54 AM (F+CeQ)

3 It's funny, the roomie is a big Ladytron fan and that song's the only one he's played during our workday commute that I really, really liked.

He also introduced me to that Slade song... have you been raiding his collection without our knowing it?!?

Posted by: GreyDuck at July 21, 2013 02:29 PM (CUkqs)

4 GD, haven't you noticed your duckies... moving... a little during the night?

Posted by: Wonderduck at July 21, 2013 06:22 PM (F+CeQ)

5 On the other hand, Cheap Trick DID appear on Pink Lady and Jeff....

Posted by: Mauser at July 22, 2013 12:37 AM (cZPoz)

6 WD, I've long since stopped noticing that, I mean come on now...

Posted by: GreyDuck at July 22, 2013 10:24 PM (CUkqs)

7 Mauser, the video for "Dream Police" was on that show.  The band themselves weren't. 

Posted by: Wonderduck at July 22, 2013 11:15 PM (F+CeQ)

8 You ran lights for Cheap Trick at the bandshell?  How have I not heard this before?  Was it a good set?

Posted by: Vaucanson's Duck at July 23, 2013 03:46 PM (CKoWa)

9 More correctly, I ran lights for a small acoustic performance by Robin Zander and someone on guitar.  I still remember quite clearly the gentle cover of Spirit's "Nature's Way" that just blew me away.  Then, as the night wore on, Bun E. showed up, then a while later so did Rick Nielsen.  There's a really great acoustic version of "Surrender" out there somewhere... actually, it sounded a lot like this one.

I don't think it was supposed to be a Cheap Trick show... I got the impression that the others just showed up and sat in. 

It wasn't quite as cool as having Stevie Ray Vaughn play a guitar solo for an audience of one (me), but it was pretty close.

Posted by: Wonderduck at July 23, 2013 07:05 PM (F+CeQ)

10 The bandshell's right in Rick's neighborhood.  He was probably out for an evening stroll...

Posted by: Vaucanson's Duck at July 23, 2013 09:34 PM (OFJiW)

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How is this video not being hailed as one of Humanity's Great Accomplishments?

Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:09 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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Hello, everybody!  DJ Wonderduck has returned with a special holiday-themed edition of the world's famous SATURDAY NIGHT TUNAGE!

Okay, locally famous.  Locally known?  Not despised within the confines of this blog?  Whatever.  It's a whole post of the few Christmas tunes I can stand to hear after having to hear them over and Over and OVER at the Duck U Bookstore... and no schmaltz, either!  Let's get right into the musicing!

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After 91 years of insane time signatures, legendary jazz musician Dave Brubeck took five today.

He wasn't the first jazz artist I was a fan of.  Heck, he wasn't even the second or third, and to be honest, while I loved "Take Five", both the single and the album, I thought he was a gimmick.  "Oh, hey, watch me play songs in a completely bizarre time that nobody other than beatniks and jazz critics can comprehend."

If you needed proof that I was an idiot when I was young, too, there you go.  Yeah, he could follow beats that would make strong musicians weak and weak musicians want to be somewhere else in a hurry, but on top of that was always a masterful melody.

It's hard to believe that "Take Five" hit #25 on the Billboard Top 100 in 1961.  Times have changed so much... musical talent isn't much appreciated anymore.  But I'll tell you this: guitar god Chet Atkins decided to take a shot at the song and declared it the most difficult piece of music he'd ever played.

...and the most entertaining. 

Dave Brubeck.  He was an artist, a pioneer.

He'll be missed.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 07:03 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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While the hours tick down until the Grand Prix of Japan, I am enthused to bring you some music that I've never heard before this morning.  For all of you who don't like music, here's a shaved alpaca:

Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:35 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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And now, by nobody's request whatsoever, Wonderduck Productions in conjunction with The Pond Entertainment presents... DJ Wonderduck with another installment of Saturday Night Tunage!  It's an eclectic mix of old and new music tonight, always with an eye on keeping your ear intrigued.  And some '80s, too.  So lets just get right to it, shall we?  Surely!

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Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:46 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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By request, it's the return of Saturday Night Tunage with DJ Wonderduck!

Yes, "by request!"  At dinner this past Tuesday with Vaucaunson's Duck and his wife Geese, The Pond came up in conversation.  It turns out that both are avid readers of this little website, and she particularly liked Saturday Night Tunage... and wanted a return.  Well, I had been planning to do one last weekend, but the latest outage of Pond Central's broadband connection (caused by a van knocking down a telephone pole) put paid to that idea.

Knowing that someone out there actually wants it, here's the newest installment of Saturday Night Tunage, the catch-all edition!  It's music time!

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Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:15 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Over in some Fark thread a few days ago, someone suggested (perhaps in jest) that The Who's Eminence Front was the "quintessential '80s song."

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:49 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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As has been chronicled repeatedly on this here blogthing, as a young fledgeling I was quite into this "music" thing that everybody's been talking about for a while now.  While my tastes tended more towards the Go-Gos, Devo, ABC and others of the "new wave" bent, there was a small portion of my brain that leaned towards what would now be called "Prog Rock" or perhaps "Art Rock."  Mind you, I didn't think of it that way, I just found it musically... interesting, in a way that even the more avant-garde groups I listened to (Joe Jackson, your table for one is ready) weren't.  Bands like Yes, the Moody Blues (Vaucaunson's Duck, please crank your volume), Rick Wakeman, Pink Floyd and their ilk... not my main fodder, to be sure, but not entirely unheard at the Olde Home Pond.  One day, an odd little album made its way into my feathery little wingtips.  This record was reviled by many of the long-time fans of the group that made it for being too different.  This record was also reviled by many of the new fans of the group that made it for being not pop enough.

The album is called ABACAB, and it's by the group Genesis.  While these days Genesis is best known
for their catchy Top-40 radio hits, they weren't always that band.  Originally led by Peter Gabriel, they were (to my ears) a particularly "out there" Prog Rock group, one that was barely listenable at all, despite being particularly talented musically.  When Gabriel left the band, the drummer for Genesis, Phil Collins, stepped up and took over the lead vocals.  They also took a more "radio-friendly" turn with their music at the same time.  While their 1980 album Duke had a couple of crowd favorites for concert play, it was ABACAB (1981) that pushed them off the ledge into the abyss of Top-40 radio.  The track "No Reply At All" borrows the horn section of the band Earth Wind & Fire to great effect, and is probably the reason I bought the vinyl in the first place (even as a young'un, I dug the horns).  Add the title track and "Keep It Dark", and you've got a album full of catchy hooks and pop fame forever, right?

Um... no.  Because on the flip side (ask your parents, kids) of the record, you've got some seriously odd things.  "Dodo/Lurker", with its strange spoken-word drop, "Man On The Corner" which tried to bring attention to the homeless problem, and perhaps my favorite track on the album, "Who Dunnit?", which is pure lyrical weirdness.  It's no surprise that the long-time fanbase  of the band tended to hate ABACAB with the fire of a thousand suns, while the ones that jumped on board because of the singles often found the rest of the album to be not what they signed up for.

Despite this dichotomy of musical styles, ABACAB was on the UK Album Charts for 27 weeks, and reached #1 for two of them.  It didn't do that well at all in the US. 

So why do I mention this odd conundrum of an album up here at The Pond?  Because, for all of its faults and it has several (not least of which is a tendency towards overproduction), I was always quite fond of it.  While the track selection on the album may tend towards the bizarre, there's no denying the musical talent on display, nor its ability to keep you interested in what's going on.   And, as I was leaving the pharmacy where I get the "keep Wonderduck alive" pills every month, there was the remastered edition of ABACAB staring me in the face from a bargain rack, for the low low price of $4.99.  Of course I couldn't resist buying it on the spot.

As soon as I got home, I began listening to the CD and discovered something incredible... I could still remember the *pop*s and *click*s my old vinyl copy had, and found it weird that the CD didn't include them.  Of course it wouldn't, that's obvious, but in my mind, the album has them and that's that.  It's still an excellent collection of music, however... not bad for a 31-year old album that pissed off most of the group's fans.

I wonder what friend GreyDuck, a Genesis fan hisownself, thinks of it?

UPDATE: I forgot to mention something I found out many years ago... the movable lighting instruments that we see everywhere these days?  Like at this Pink Floyd concert, for example... they were invented by what eventually became Vari-Lite for Genesis' concert tour promoting this album.  Lighting Designers everywhere rejoiced.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:19 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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1 Well, I had a moderately detailed comment in the works, then I made the egregious mistake of opening a tab in my browser and my computer bluescreened.

Sigh.

To sum up, while my computer's still alive: ABACAB is quite the pivot point for Genesis, coming right after Phil's first (huge) solo success, and turning the band from more of a "Tony And Mike, Plus Phil" thing into a full-on trio. Collaborative jam sessions were in, guys bringing mostly-completed material into the studio from outside the room were largely out. The results are, as you've heard, rather hit-or-miss.

(I knew the subject of this post just from the title, since "Dodo/Lurker" is one of my all-time favorite Genesis tracks. Yes, this reveals a lot about me, I know.)

Honestly, the only track I really don't like is "Who Dunnit?" The rest of it holds up really well against the Genesis catalog, and is by far my favorite of the post-Hackett-transitional records.

I think that to understand Genesis you have to understand that, as a band, they were compelled to do something just a bit weird every few songs, even toward the end. Since this is an impulse I can identify with... there you go.

As an aside: Their first "big hit" came from the first post-Steve-Hackett record, And Then There Were Three. And it's not Phil Collins' fault, but rather Mike (later also of + The Mechanics) Rutherford is to blame... the sappy, reggae-tinged "Follow You, Follow Me." I can't stand that song...

Posted by: GreyDuck at April 18, 2012 07:39 AM (Buiw/)

2 I don't know why, and there's probably no real justification for it, but I've always felt that Duke was more of a Phil album than Abacab.  It had very little in the way of old-Genesis weirdness.  Still and all, Duke's my favorite of the post-Hackett albums.  It just has a certain Eighties-existential ferocity which I found appealing.

And yeah, Who Dunnit? is an annoying damn track.  I've heard worse in prog-rock - I had a friend re-cut my copy of Jethro Tull's A Passion Play to cut the horribly twee spoken-word rant in the middle so that I could listen to it without cringing - but that track was grating.

Posted by: Mitch H. at April 18, 2012 11:56 AM (jwKxK)

3 Mitch, a non-annoying edit of A Passion Play almost sounds interesting. Almost. I like Tull but not enough to seek out new ways to hear rubbish efforts.

And really, between Duke and Abacab you can't go wrong with either. I think that Duke is a vastly more cohesive listening experience... arguably the last Genesis album you can say that about, come to think of it. But with lyrics like you get in Guide Vocal (and thus Duke's End) and Heathaze, Tony's adorably clunky wordsmithing is still front-and-center. *wry grin* (Hey, I can poke fun. I own all of his solo records. He has his gifts, but he's never been the world's greatest lyricist.)

But anyway: Great post, Mr. Duck. Now to go "put another... record on..."

Posted by: GreyDuck at April 18, 2012 09:15 PM (Buiw/)

4 So... do you go for the Doctor Who interpretive theory of the album, or do you think it's total rubbish?

"Keep It Dark" and "Me and Sarah Jane" are arguable, and of course the latter provided some awesome fanvids. But the rest of it, not so much.

Posted by: Maureen at April 21, 2012 08:50 AM (fGqjI)

5 I did wonder about "Me and Sarah Jane," to be honest, but that's only been recently.  At the time the album came out, I don't think I knew there had been a companion named Sarah Jane (I started watching with Tom Baker).

Posted by: Wonderduck at April 21, 2012 09:04 AM (PVVuW)

6 No, I'm pretty sure that Doctor Who has nothing to do with the album. The band only ever actually did one "concept" record, and that one was (by all accounts) quite a debacle... it cost them Peter Gabriel, for starters.

Posted by: GreyDuck at April 22, 2012 11:49 PM (Buiw/)

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Saturday Night Tunage, starring DJ Wonderduck, has returned!  "But DJ Wonderduck," I hear you saying, "it's not Saturday.  How can it be time for Saturday Night Tunage?"  Well, there's an interesting story behind that... originally, this series was to be on Friday, and be called "The Friday Night Fish Fry, with DJ Wonderduck."  Kinda like the title of this post, actually.

Okay, it wasn't that interesting of a story.  But it was a story, no way you can deny that!  Anyway!  You don't come to Saturday Night Tunage The Friday Night Fish Fry to hear stories, you come for the music... so let's get right to it!  And we've got a theme, to boot... Wonderduck goes to Minnesota!  And I swear that it's all true to the best of my memories.  The coincidences are firmly entrenched in my brain.

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Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:22 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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There are terms in this world that I really am not fond of.  For example, "drilling down" is one of them.  It's not good enough that we're discovering the sources of something, heavens no.  We have to drill down instead.  Corporate-speak in all its myriad forms is annoying to me to be honest, but "drilling down" just happened to be on my mind just now.  "Downsizing" and its more offensive derivative "rightsizing" are horrid enough to make my skin crawl.

Another of these cutesy fauxspeak words that's slowly crawled into the modern lexicon is "crowdsourcing".  Take any problem and send it out to the invisible masses on the far side of their computer monitors.  These masses will come back with possible solutions, perhaps quite ingenious ones.  Katawa Shoujo could sorta be considered a crowdsourced project, in a way.  The Oxford English Dictionary was, from the very start, crowdsourced.  I really don't like the term, but there you are. 

I recently stumbled over a great example of crowdsourcing, one that just couldn't occur at any time before now.

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Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:00 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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On the border of music and madness, it's DJ Wonderduck back again to spin you the infamous Saturday Night Tunage!  It's been a few months since the last time we did this, so lets get right to it, shall we?  No theme this time around, just the music that's the backing track to the miniseries that is our lives. 

Wow, that wasunexpectedly kinda deep.  Wait, no, not deep... it was shallow, masquerading as deep, kinda like what passes for music these days.  Pop music and pop philosophy here on Saturday Night Tunage!  Next up, the latest hit by Kierkegaard and the Existentialists!

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Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:31 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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DJ Wonderduck here, and I'm pulling on the racing coveralls tonight.  That's right, this evening we'll be looking at a collection of music relating to Formula 1 and other motorsports!  And boy, this one was NOT easy to put together... mostly because there isn't as much "racing" music out there as you'd like to think.  And a lot of that stuff that's out there isn't very good... but there is some that's worthwhile!  Lights out, let's roll!

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Yes, DJ Wonderduck is back, and I'm cleaning the dust off my turntables to bring you another theme entry!  I was sitting around last evening, pointedly not doing anything of value on a Friday night, when I decided to do a video search for "Live Aid", that amazing series of concerts in 1985.  While I was watching Queen burn down Wembley Stadium, the idea for this post hit me.

Longtime readers know that I used to work in the radio biz.  As near as I can figger, at least two of my readers (Brickmuppet, Greyduck) did so as well.  Well tonight, I pay tribute to the technological marvel that used to be the best way to hear music before you bought it.  Ladies and Gentlemen and Ducks, here's to Radio!  For my younger readers, there was once a time when music flew through the air instead of through cables and wires.  It was a wonderous time, a time of booming voices and catchy jingles, a time of fun and joy.  Now, it's all digital this and iPod that and auto-frickin'-tune and on and on... bah.  Get off my damn lawn.

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Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:42 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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While we all wait for my brain to decompress enough to get around to writing up the Friday Practice post for the Italian GP weekend, I've gotta share these excellent mashups I've stumbled upon recently.

First up, Sad But Superstitious:

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The original plan for tonight was to write up a post on the PBY Catalina.  I've discovered instead that I don't have the mental oomph to tackle that the way it deserves.  Today was move-in day for the first-year students at Duck U, and our first really busy day of Fall Book Rush.  It was also Day 6 of 12 in a row for me.  I came home, had something to eat, and fell asleep in my comfy chair.  But what I do have the mental oomph for is some Tunage!

...and where there's Tunage, there's DJ Wonderduck!  Tonight, my children, in tribute to all the 18-year-olds spending their first night at Duck U., I bring you music from before they were born... mostly!  Let's get on with the show...
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I've wanted to do this theme for a while, and tonight, I'm gonna do it!  Run in fear everybody!

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