November Challenge Thread: All-Stars Edition!

November 16
We Built This City hits #1 in the Billboard charts today in 1985. This (Jefferson) Starship song is often called (by me at least) the worst #1 in history.
Play the worst you got.

I should play this song but unfortunately don't have it on vinyl. And also it's awesome.

Worst #1 song in history to me is probably Ice Ice Baby. Awful and sacrilegious.

I'll go with this:

Phil Collins "No Jacket Required" (1985 Wea Japan)
I don't know what to play since I don't keep bad records or songs. I looked around my collection to see if there were any bad #1's hiding as part of compilations or anything, but I couldn't find any. I checked out internet lists and people mention Sussudio. Sussudio isn't one of Phil's best, but I like it enough. I guess I'll go with it anyway. Always good to listen to "bad" songs you like.

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Day 15 - TV

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Madonna - True Blue

I obviously knew about her before this but RuPauls’s Drag Race Really gave me a new appreciation for Madonna when they did a Rusical episode all about her. And this episode is what made me want to dive into her discography and what made me into the super fan I am of her now. This is also a great opportunity to talk about my how much this show has shaped my appreciation of music the past 4 years. Since I discovered the show over quarantine it has introduced me to so many albums/artists/songs I love now through its episodes and lip sync performances. It’s not just Madonna it lead me to love but so many others like Whitney Houston, Donna Summer, Luther Vandross, En Vogue and so many others. I highly recommend watching this Rusical for Madonna and some of the lipsyncs they done to her songs







 
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17. On November 17th, 2009, my good friend Tempest Grace Gale was murdered and dumped in the water of Ford’s Cove, where she lived on her boat. She was a musician, marionette maker, stilt walker, unicyclist, and one of the best road trip companions I’ve ever had. I miss her every day.
  • Play some folk punk, or
  • Play something circus-y, or
  • Play something by somebody who was murdered.
Jesus, man. This is totally crushing. At the same time, how lucky you were to have been so close to such a special person. Few folks get that opportunity in a lifetime.

I'm gonna donate to the documentary fundrazr.

No more death. In honor of her puppetry, I'm going with 'Marionette'...



Soul Asylum - Hang Time

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Day 17

I don’t know that this is folk punk. I will say this, seeing them live is akin to seeing the Black Crowes if they were a punk band and that seems close enough to me. Although, I will say Lee Bains’ whole aesthetic is both punk and folk… so I declare him Folk Punk anyhow. Also, @Yer Ol' Uncle D and I both think more of you should be listening to him.

IMG_3672.jpegLee Bains + the Glory Fires - Old-Time Folks
 
Nee Lewman said:
Day 17

I don’t know that this is folk punk. I will say this, seeing them live is akin to seeing the Black Crowes if they were a punk band and that seems close enough to me. Although, I will say Lee Bains’ whole aesthetic is both punk and folk… so I declare him Folk Punk anyhow. Also, @Yer Ol' Uncle D and I both think more of you should be listening to him.

View attachment 218845Lee Bains + the Glory Fires - Old-Time Folks
Click to expand...

LBIII&TGF are totally on the same wavelength as Tempest Grace Gale while presenting things a little louder and aggressive in band form.

Lee does solo shows too. Here's two songs from a gig I taped a couple years ago. The first song and Lee's introduction are so spot-on today...

 
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Yer Ol' Uncle D said:
Jesus, man. This is totally crushing.
Click to expand...

I did wonder for a second or three if I was maybe bringing too much heavy, but ultimately landed on this being a perfect space to celebrate her spirit. I can pretty much guarantee she wouldn't have taken part in our shenanigans, but she'd love that this gathering place of freaks and weirdos exists. And would especially have loved how much joy it brings me.

I'm so glad the person who recorded the video I included posted it after she was killed; that was an incredibly special evening. I liked to joke with people that we kidnapped Tempest to that gig in Ucluelet. Two nights prior she had set up a show for my buddy Jeff's and my folk n' spoken word duo, Ghosts of the Highway, on Hornby Island—a place I'd wanted to visit for years but hadn't yet been; my second visit to the island was 11 months later for her funeral. After Hornby, we hopped back over to the big island to do a show with her in nearby Courtenay (which my mom and stepdad attended while visiting my Nana up that way; it remains the only gig of mine they've ever been to) after which she planned to "get back to my island," but we kept insisting she should come to Ucluelet with us. Thankfully peer pressure worked and even more thankfully we have this video! We dropped her off at the ferry back to her island the next day and made our way back down to Victoria. The house where our gig happened was a friend of one of Jeff's treeplanting buddies, and the video does not even remotely do justice to that seascape mural on their living room wall!

Y'all, this young woman was so amazing we needed to have TWO funerals for her. The first was a harrowing affair full of weeping, moaning, and wailing (and eventually song) as we all who had gathered took turns filling in the hole to which she had been lain (appropriately from around the time she died until pretty much the moment we finished burying her the weather around the islands was blustery, miserable and wet; then, when the last of the dirt had fallen, the rain stopped and, within a few minutes the sun had shaken loose of the clouds. No shit!) Her grandparents had come up from California, but shit was waaaay too heavy for them to really meet her people at the time, so they came back a few months later and we put the fun back in FUNeral with a PeStival to celebrate her life: a weekend for the freaks and weirdos to frolic in her honour and properly celebrate. There were all kinds of music, from punk to folk to metal to jazz, there was poetry, there was art, juggling, stilt-walking, fire-spinning, and an amazing collection of of her special things (I forgot to mention in my brief description of her that the marionettes she would make were out of scavenged animal bones she would find on the beach and in the woods Her collection of bones that had yet to be used was gifted for us to each take one—I still have the jawbone of what I assume was a young deer.) There was merriment and there was mirth! The way it should be.
 
Yer Ol' Uncle D said:
At the same time, how lucky you were to have been so close to such a special person. Few folks get that opportunity in a lifetime.
Click to expand...

I am so grateful.

And I have quite literally had her with me every day for the past 15 years:
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Not just in spirit, but in body. This symbol, now a sigil on my calf, is how she signed her art. I can't recall whether it was night 2, or 3, or 4, of mourning for me, but over the week a bunch of us got and gave stick n' poke tattoos of her symbol; each given deeper meaning by who we had to them. Mine was done by my high school bestie, who has, basically, never left Hornby since the PeStiva,l and who was the puppet master behind my wife and I being introduced. The only thing remotely resembling regret about that tattoo, sometimes, is that it's not somewhere more visible to me.

Anyhoo, these posts went longer and deeper than I'd originally intended. The gummy kicked in and I'm revisiting so many good memories right now. Thanks for joining the ride.
 
Nee Lewman said:
Day 17

I don’t know that this is folk punk. I will say this, seeing them live is akin to seeing the Black Crowes if they were a punk band and that seems close enough to me. Although, I will say Lee Bains’ whole aesthetic is both punk and folk… so I declare him Folk Punk anyhow. Also, @Yer Ol' Uncle D and I both think more of you should be listening to him.

View attachment 218845Lee Bains + the Glory Fires - Old-Time Folks
Click to expand...

Yer Ol' Uncle D said:
LBIII&TGF are totally on the same wavelength as Tempest Grace Gale while presenting things a little louder and aggressive in band form.

Lee does solo shows too. Here's two songs from a gig I taped a couple years ago. The first song and Lee's introduction are so spot-on today...

Click to expand...


All of this is extremely spot-on. All counts.
 
17. On November 17th, 2009, my good friend Tempest Grace Gale was murdered and dumped in the water of Ford’s Cove, where she lived on her boat. She was a musician, marionette maker, stilt walker, unicyclist, and one of the best road trip companions I’ve ever had. I miss her every day.
  • Play some folk punk, or
  • Play something circus-y, or
  • Play something by somebody who was murdered.
Will go with something that starts out with a song from Pinocchio for the puppeteer, and then moves to a gorgeous version of Baby Mine from Dumbo for the circus.

Thank you for letting us celebrate Tempest with you.

Various Artists ~ Stay Awake

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I have a lot of catching up to do. Last week was a doozy for me and I was having trouble wanting to play the punk albums I had for war. I really needed something a lot more mellow due to some unforeseen migraines. I did play day 12 as a record that @zomgbear hyped in JQBX.

I promise to play day 11 next.

Elliot Nang - Gaijin
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