Yuku free message boards

Sirius/XM is the answer. You'll save a fortune in CDs, and if you spend some time channel flipping, you can turn up new surprises every day.

As with a lot of things, the temptation to get into a rut is there. In my laziness, I've been spending too much time on Sirius channels 30/31/32 (30 "The Coffee House"- folk, jazz, acoustic versions of rock songs, and brief "unplugged" live sets by all sorts of well-known artists; 31 "Margaritaville", Jimmy Buffett's signature radio show- which is far from all Buffett, all the time, it goes off in all sorts of directions, from reggae to country to Motown and 1960s "beach music", surf rock, the Beach Boys, classic rock, you name it- + I just heard Buffett's new one, a duet with Toby Keith called "I'm A Real Piece Of Work", and it's one of the best damn things he's ever written. Plus, his Coral Reefer Band cooks, they can play anything- and Margaritaville also gives regular bandwidth to Little Feat! And through it all, the upbeat, good-timey philosophy that pervades every show works for me. I respect Buffett tremendously for giving me that station; 32 "The Grateful Dead", which is self-explanatory. The first time I heard the channel, a fan was programming the music, and he played some of his favorite shows from the 90s, their most hit-or-miss era. The sound quality was as underwhelming as the song choices, and I was prepared to shrug and write it off..but hold on. A few tastes of some of the live show material that's periodically been put into rotation, like Minneapolis in 9169- "Alligator>>Caution"- and the epic 2nd set of Winterland SF in Feb. 24 9174, and the unique teleportation features began to work marvelously well. It isn't always that good, although often it is quite spectacular. It helps that I'm a DFHDH, of course. But after a while, even at it's best the Dead channel gets to be like eating three triple chocolate mousses in a row, followed by a double fudge hot sundae with devil's food cake... enough. Time to head over to the Standards channel, and listen to Frank Sinatra and Dinah Washington and Billy Eckstine and Joe Williams and Theresa Brewer and David Allyn and Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong- learn a few more of the lyrics to those old Jerome Kern songs. And then there's the "cosmic Coltrane type jazz" channel, and the Springsteen channel, and the Jambands channel, and the Vault, and about 100 other channels I have yet to explore...Georg Solti conducting Mahler's 1st? Zubin Mehta doing Varese's "Arcana"? Hey, I'm up for it...

The worst part is programming the radio, really- I just want a tuner with a 3-digit numeric punch, but all the tuner companies seem to want you to memorize their arcane and insanely overcomplicated programming systems. Just one of the reasons that SiriusXM stock presently sells for around $.13 a share, in my opinion...along with "no billboard advertising budget", "no free introductory tuner giveaways to get listeners hooked for life" and "no listener community building (not even a few bumper stickers.)"

For instance, if the Frank Sinatra freaks knew how good the Sinatra channel was...and like the rest of the SiriusXM channels, you can drive from coast to coast and listen to it with only trivial glitchiness!

I could fix the problems, if they'd let me. SiriusXM is a sound product. There's no need to run scared of digital FM, which will undoubtedly still be commercially interrupted and rife with mediocre cluelessness no matter what the tech advances. But as it stands, the management problems offset the sound basic service product that SiriusXM delivers- to the point where I'm hesitant to even pick up a measly 1000 shares at their present dirt cheap selling price. I'm afraid they'll implode by next month, and retreat from the market entirely.

I still play CDs, too- most recently in the player:

Bob Dylan, Masked And Anonymous soundtrack (the film is mostly a waste of time, although Jeff Bridges and John Goodman both have their moments...and Bob Dylan does do a pretty good Bob Dylan impression in it.)

Mark Knopfler, Shangri-La

David Crosby, Thousand Roads

Ani DiFranco, Canon vol. 1

They're all great. But the first three songs on the David Crosby CD- Phil Collins' "Hero"; Jimmy Webb's "Too Young To Die"; and Marc Cohn's "Old Soldier"- are out of this world. A record few people know exists- even if they've heard the other three CDs, which are pretty obscure in and of themselves. All those singers I mentioned above, talking about the Standards channel on Sirius- David Crosby is one of a very few singers of popular music from the last 50 years with that caliber of voice. A very few.

I've heard a couple people say that about Neil Young.

(I'm not sure they could hear themselves, though.)

They had a thing for being right in the line of fire from the PA cabinets.

I've had my bell rung a few times. Not like that, though.

Two recently departed musicians who never "made it big", but who made superlative music...my personal theory is that they were both, in their own ways, too good:

Laura Allan- who in her youth- which lasted an extraordinarily long time- would have been ideal for the female lead role in The River Why, imo. How many people can write a positive song without it sounding like treacle? Laura could. Sang like an angel, too. Others might disagree, but for me her music represented sort of the limit of tasty sweetness, without ever going over the line into sounding saccharine. Sadly, cancer took her last year at age 56, just like that.

John Martyn- who had a voice that could range between Stan Getz's saxophone and a Grisly Bear, and who played a finger-picked guitar put through so many effects boxes that it sounded like a pinball machine with the specials lit, which has led more than one listener to refer to him as "the Jimi Hendrix of the acoustic guitar." He could scramble your mind with that thing for several superimposed eternities at one turn, and nail a ballad like "Spencer The Rover" or "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" the next, like he was seeing God the whole time.

Also an unreconstructed party boy to the end, marital and health consequences be damned- a rough divorce; a broken neck (it healed); adult-onset diabetes most likely brought on by hitting the bottle all the time, which eventually led to a leg amputation a few years back; chronic obstructive pulmonary disease that eventually took him, from pneumonia in January. Cowboy in, cowboy out. Made it to age 60, somehow. An angler, incidentally.

Trout stream music, both of them.

No live material on YouTube for Laura Allan, unfortunately- only one of the lesser tunes from her over-produced 1978 debut LP, giving little indication of her appeal or the full extent of her talents, although you do get to hear her voice. And the only vid is the "tomboy" shot from the front of the record cover. You want to see what Laura Allan really looked like, find the LP and have a look at the photo on the back. And then play the record-- there are some good songs on there, 70s MOR pop gloss and all. I note that the record is available as an import-only CD on Amazon, one copy presently available for a cool $51.99.

Plenty of live YouTube material for John Martyn, though, much of it professionally produced and terrific. Here's a sample-- "Spencer The Rover"

http://www.youtube.com/wa...nWJY&feature=related