Bowiesongs (C. O'Leary)

For Your Eyes Only. The bonkers sequence where they try to kill Bond with a few belligerent hockey players remains a favorite

Neil Sedaka: 14 Essential Songs

I selected 14 essential Neil Sedaka songs for the New York Times, balancing his effervescent early hits with his lush '70s comeback.

Neil Sedaka Dead At 86 Neil Sedaka, the singer and songwriter behind hits like “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do,” “Bad Blood,” “Laughter In The Rain,” and “Calendar Girl,” has died. “Our family is devastated by the sudden passing...

Neil Sedaka dead at 86

YouTube video by David Bowie - Topic Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola (2015 Remaster)

Oh man and I just clocked that later on in the evening here at #sanremo there's going to be a cover of "Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola." You might well know it and its singer in a slightly different form... www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EZC...

As we wait to see what will become of Warner Bros., remember: if there’s art you value and know you’ll want to live with it over time, buy it physically (if you can afford to, if it exists in physical form)

page from My Blue Heaven, with Swamp Thing making a duplicate of himself

"My Blue Heaven" (Swamp Thing #56) is one of her finest moments in the series. A color palette greatly confined to blues and bled-out greens/yellows, and just stunning

Adventure Comics #431 featuring the Spectre

This is her

Swamp Thing and Abby Arcane

two page spread from Swamp Thing, with Wood adding a spectacular red backdrop to a single panel, in the same tone as Abby's shirt

Wood's variations on greens and light yellow adds to a trippy 2page spread

Tatjana Wood, in the mix of Moore, Veitch, Bissette, Totleben etc on Swamp Thing, was the equivalent of a great bassist in a band---if not appreciated enough, absolutely essential to the whole. RIP.

The secret hero of Moore's Swamp Thing run.

A service truly devoted to getting worse every few months: it's an accomplishment of sorts

Marvin Gaye, I Want You (Mar 1976)

Pet Shop Boys, Please (Mar 1986)

Stereolab, Emperor Tomato Ketchup (Mar 1996)

Ghostface Killah, Fishscale (Mar 2006)

turning 50, 40, 30, & 20 in March, respectively

OKeh 1949-1957 3 CD set

Book and CDs

CDs are still bargains dept.: found this yesterday---3 discs of great music & extensive liners, all for $15.

A graph of data center vs office construction, showing data centers basically tied with offices

The US now spends basically as much on data center construction as on office construction

yeah that song can drag a bit unless they give it something fun---and that performance delivers

For posterity (and because I just found it), a thing I wrote almost 20 years ago (!) for the AV Club.

Isolar 50: Cleveland, 27-28 February 1976 | Chris O'Leary Get more from Chris O'Leary on Patreon

Thin White Duke 50: Bowie hits Cleveland and has a blast, with one of the best recordings of the tour: www.patreon.com/posts/isolar...

Great piece. Will Hermes’s “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire” is a history of NYC popular music that includes the salsa movement, left out of other accounts because Spanish.

wow, this really was a "let's do this and be legends!" kind of improv thing

the "Love Boat" theme seems intended for some crew member of the Love Boat to sing it

yeah we're about to move fully into the electrical recording era, so century-old recordings are going to sound eerily "modern"

Gary Giddins: "This isn't the smooth oo-bop-sh'bam or shooby-dooby-doo of postwar scat but a volcanic throat-clearing: "eh, eef, gaff, mmf, dee-bo, deedlelabam..." Scat was on the map...As Earl Hines said, musicians were sticking their heads out of windows trying to catch colds to sound like Louis."

YouTube video by DRAGUNOFF Heebie Jeebies-Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five

cut in Chicago 100 years ago on this date: a wonderful, joyous, swinging record. Armstrong was far from being the first to scat, but he did it masterfully here. Nothing would be the same afterward for Armstrong, for jazz, for US pop music: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksmG...

yeah, not sure. maybe their term for "sale"?

Station to Station at $3.99 (about $23 now), David Live at $7.98 (like 45 bucks now!)

Bowie concert celebration sale at Disc Records at the Summit Mall & Severance Center--David Live for 8 bucks!* (Cleveland Press, 27 Feb 1976) (*inflation-adjusted, this was not really cheap)

you can really hear it in the bridge, where it gets weird in spots (the bit after "it's all gonna fade")

i think Paul Simon claimed "Still Crazy After All These Years" is 12-tone (or at least uses all 12 tones at some point)

Roxie at peace on the couch

Contemplation

INXS a bit too disco-adjacent for a hardened rock radio vet

"Being generous"

a reboost for the eve. if you've never seen the Super 8 footage of this show, it's one of the best (and one of very few) visual documents of the tour---if only there was more of it, & with sound