Entries from May 2008

May 30, 2008

20/20/20 vision, Part IV

We’re back with the next-to-last installment of our brief series, 20 Songs from 20 Albums for $20.
There are tunes off the albums I found under the tents in the back yard of one of our local used record dealers earlier this month. We’re spinning them at random, much the way we found them as we [...]

May 28, 2008

The man behind the theme

You may not know his name, but you know his songs. Earle Hagen composed some of the most recognizable instrumentals of the 20th century.
Hagen, who was 88 when he died Monday in California, wrote the themes to these 1960s TV shows, each expressing the essence of the show and its setting in less than a [...]

May 27, 2008

Midnight Tracker sampler, Vol. 7

Over at our other blog, The Midnight Tracker, we’re fulfilling a request by serving up a side from the soundtrack to “Where the Buffalo Roam.”
That’s the 1980 film in which Bill Murray played gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, for better or worse.
It has a soundtrack on which Neil Young orchestrates and performs several riffs and [...]

May 26, 2008

My people in Iowa

My week of vacation started with Dionne Warwick on Monday night, then Kid Rock on Tuesday night.
It ended Saturday night with still another American pop icon, another underappreciated national treasure. We drove to east-central Iowa, to a new casino out in the middle of farmland, to see Neil Sedaka.
My reasons for wanting to see Sedaka [...]

May 22, 2008

20/20/20 vision, Part III

We’re back with the third installment of 20 Songs from 20 Albums for $20.
These tunes are part of the haul from a recent morning of crate digging in the back yard of one of our local used record dealers.
Please enjoy the tunes, spun at random, much the way I came across them in the tents [...]