Party. My house. 5:30.

Sugar Magnolia by the Grateful Dead???

[Slaps forehead with palm of head]

C'mon, the rabid atheism is one thing, but that...

[shakes head, wanders off sadly.]

On the unlikely event that I somehow quantum-tunnel to your neck of the woods tonight, I'll show.

Won't the snow in the forecast keep the attendance down?

Hedningarna?! I'm impressed. But can you tell when they're singing in Finnish, and when in Swedish?

Bob

"It's about time for a party at my house
And it wouldn't be the same without you
No not at all as I recall
You've got what I need"

Sorry, but MxPx is what I thought of when I saw the title.

No Pogues tunes? Well, count me out then--just for that. Well, that and being halfway across the country. And having a baby to put to bed. But if it weren't for all that, I'd be there with bells on, PZ!

;)

Bob, not just Hedningarna, but Hege Rimestad as well. And a Warren Zevon song.
Despite PZ's impeccable and catholic (in the non-religious sense of the word) taste, I'll have to call a rain check on that party, because I don't feel up to swimming and then running the distance to his place right now.

My last 10, taken from my last.fm page:
Richard Thompson - Waltzing's For Dreamers just listened
Roy Harper - Francesca 5 minutes ago
John C. Reilly - Fathom The Bowl 9 minutes ago
Bill Frisell - Spanish Ladies 11 minutes ago
Marlene Dietrich - Assez 35 minutes ago
Muse - Feeling Good 38 minutes ago
Bow Wow Wow - Do You Wanna Hold Me 42 minutes ago
Roy Harper - Goodbye 1h and 27m ago
Deep Purple - Silver Tongue 1h and 31m ago
David Thomas - Dan Dan 1h and 32m ago

The Cure's "Lullaby" was playing on my car stereo the night I got my first two traffic tickets, senior year of high school. One was for driving on the wrong side of the road and the other for driving around a police barricade.

Translation: a storm had taken down a power line and left it sprawled across an intersection, in a residential part of town. A couple City work vehicles were parked at the scene, complete with City workers standing around, doing nothing. A police cruiser was parked beside them (with no flashing lights), complete with doughnut-eating cop inside. Apparently, such a parked car constitutes a "police barricade", and the three-point turn I was executing to get myself pointed back to a part of town where the lights were still shining took me over to "the wrong side of the road".

Ah, the memories.

According to google maps it would be about

2,192 km (about 1 day 2 hours)

for me to get there from Ottawa (Canada).

Although for some reason it has me driving down through Chicago and then going back up, rather than cross through in between the great lakes.

Dang!

George Cauldron:
great song, best damn band there ever was (at least in the "rock" realm)...what's yer problem?

now The Cure on the other hand...ew

Well, start driving, Colin. We'll just keep the party going through to tomorrow evening, so no problem.

Someday, some fragment of my Meatloaf collection is going to expose itself on the Friday Random Ten, and there will ululations of woe from all of my readers.

great song, best damn band there ever was (at least in the "rock" realm)...what's yer problem?

Oh my god -- they got you, too!

Hmmm, I haven't heard of many of those artists - but then, not a lot of people I know have heard of Dimmu Borgir or Meshuggah.

If you toss some Tool on that list, I might consider driving in from British Columbia. Expect me around 3AM Sunday morning, okay?

Sugar Magnolia by the Grateful Dead???

Just heard it. Thought I wouldn't like it, but I liked it. Whoever wrote it was either pure genius or utterly mad.

If you want real music, try some Beethoven.

Classical is to music as atheism is to philosophy; rock is to music as fundamentalist religion is to philosophy.

And to the Zeitgeist, the public consciousness, neither atheism or classical music are cool.

I'm with George. The dead? Ouch.
Would rather rock with new wave goths than hippies.
But that's just me. Goths dance better too.

I worked with a prep school kid one summer. We would listen to
hard core punk and then he would throw in dead bootleg and just
comepletely bum me out.

Hey, Warren Zevon's cool, kinda... and there's a Cure tune on my Friday random X, also.

You know what a Grateful Dead fan says when he runs out of dope, right?

Let me call my dad and get some more?

Sorry, but, uh, anyone who says that the Grateful Dead were a better band than Creedence Clearwater Revival ('Rock' or otherwise) is someone I simply can't talk to about music.

Whoops, that dates me.

(And believe me, that is not meant to imply that I think the Dead were the second best band after CCR.)

Hey! How do you clear a bunch of Deadheads out of your house?

George, I grew up five miles outside of Lodi. Would never, ever, ever want to be stuck in it again.

John Fogerty would understand totally. I live about a quarter mile from where he grew up.

Where'd you grow up? Galt?

North Stockton. Not quite so bad in the sheer rural hell sense, but much worse in the race-based gang sense.

(Wow, someone knows where Galt is...)

And how *do* you clear a bunch of Deadheads out of your house? My Beloved Sweetie is friends with a couple (note that he himself is not now, nor has he ever been, a fan of the jam band phenomenon). It would be useful to know, especially at 1 a.m. on Saturday nights.

"Hey everybody! I just got the phone bill!"

Bah. You insist on living in MN.

Well, if you ever have a party in Chicago, lemme know. 11 hours is a bit much, but 3 hours I can manage.

Gee PZ, I thought you would like Phish.

"Oh, Wilson someday I'll kill you 'till you dead.
Oh, Wilson, Punch You in the Eye."

Wow, that's some violent lyrics there, coming from Sweet Baby James...

I am so not buying the Regina Spektor hype. I'll take my Tori Amos without a Russian accent, thankyouverymuch.

(Count me in the non-Deadhead group, also.)

Raven, you would have to know the story of the man who stepped into yesterday which is about a man who passes into another realm ruled by the autocratic ruler Wilson who practices torture, summary executions and is backed by the mystical "helping friendly" book. I think the lyrics are appropriate.

Any nascent fondness I ever had for Phish was squelched by a co-worker who insisted on Bogarting the stereo and playing his Phish bootlegs.

Which were all, as far as I could tell, recorded by a loud-voiced drunkard who apparently had a mic hidden in his shoe.

How about these lyrics Raven?

"Give the director a serpent deflector,
a mudrat detector, a ribbon reflector,
a cushion confector, a picture of nector,
a viral dissector, a hormone collector.

Whatever you do, take care of your shoes."

PZ:

Well, start driving, Colin. We'll just keep the party going through to tomorrow evening, so no problem.

Well, party hard and don't stop. Maybe invite along a few aerospace engineers who can mount a propulsion system on your house to really really get the party flying. Then you can swoop down on unsuspecting small towns and raid them for liquor when your supplies dwindle. Parties like that have been known in The Literature to go on for generations.

Martin

People! It's the random 10! Don't take this as a quantitative measure of my preferences!

I also have CCR (and prefer them to the Dead, but hey, Sugar Magnolia is kinda trippy), and I have much, much more Tori Amos than I do Spektor.

RedMolly, the board mixes are always reliable. I let my Phish fixation lapse for a while, but it was rekindled more recently. It does take a certain level of appreciation though to love any jam band. I've just always been amazed at the brilliant story-telling capacity of Trey, but some of the shows could really beat you down with a multiple twenty minute jams in the middle of any song.

If anyone is interested in Phish, I do suggest starting with Gamehenge and the story of The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday, because it defines the universe that all of their songs are told in. If you don't understand that story, then none of the songs make much sense, but of course, they don't have to. The story itself is very relevant to our current political situation which is kinda freaky since Trey wrote it twenty some odd years ago.

Dudes! It's ALL good! Gimmee some Dead, some Creedence, followed up by some Foo Fighters, Echo and the Bunnymen, Alternate Routes, and Sonic Youth, blended with some Maria McKee, or Crowded House, or Death Cab, or Weezer. After the pigs-in-blankets get eaten and the air is full of smoke, throw on some Bartok, or Miles, or if you're feeling experimental, some Ghost Orgy follwed by "The Gates of Delirium", and see who's left standing when the sun comes up.

The possibilities are endless. Are there an infinite number of possible musical compositions? You betcha! Soak 'em all in while your ears still talk to your brain! :-)

Meatloaf, huh? Heh... Yeah, I was Class of '79, and I remember Ellen Foley. (Hey, I even saw Ellen solo at the Paradise Theatre on Comm Ave in Boston circa 1983... awesome.)

We are flying a skull and crossbones flag outside the house, Martin. I suppose a Crimson Permanent Assurance Co. scenario for the evening is a possibility.

I prefer Ripple to Sugar Magnolia, but that is just me.

PZ,

Interesting though that might also be, I was thinking more along the lines of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. As our heroes visit the party of similar description, I am not at all surprised that in the middle of the boisterous crowd of partygoers, we find Thor the thundergod, a local of my neighbourhoor. If it's rowdy and the mead flows plentifully, we'll be there.

Martin

"We are flying a skull and crossbones flag outside the house, Martin. I suppose a Crimson Permanent Assurance Co. scenario for the evening is a possibility."

Will you be sailing the house over to Minneapolis and ravaging the corporate overlords?

If I had to pin myself down to a favorite Dead song, it would have to be..."Friend of the Devil". Obviously.

Hmmm. The winds do blow in the direction of those scurvy dogs in Minneapolis. It may be. Arrr.

hey
i was jsut reading some Douglas Adams today. (the Salmon of Doubt) and he was talking about the beatles vs Stones battles at his school. The more things change... Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong singing It Ain't Necessarily So anyone? It's 18 hours from Denver, so you have to give me more notice. Otherwise a bottle of Rum I be bring. Arrrgh!
Hey this music sucks!
Charlie

Not that anyone cares, but here's my Friday Random Ten.

No FLogging Molly?!? What'll we mosh to?

Oh yeah, GWAR!

Classical is better than rock. Anyone who disagrees needs to listen to Prokofiev's Suggestion Diabolique, anything from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, and Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp minor.

j - the lyrics are a bit weak ;)

"Classical is better than rock."

No, classical is great LIKE rock...nothing like going from Gwar to Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture.

...or from Debussey's The Sunken Cathedral to Zappa.

I nwver thought I'd see GWAR mentioned here.

not a lot of people I know have heard of Dimmu Borgir or Meshuggah.

If I thought I could make it from the UK I'd bring Dark Tranquility and more Novembre than you could shake a squid at...

There will BE no flogging of Molly.

For moshing purposes, may I humbly suggest The Dillinger Escape Plan feat. Mike Patton? Their cover of Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy" is one of the most disturbing things ever set to vinyl.

Oh, and, um, "Cult" off the new Slayer record "Christ Illusion" pretty much rocks too.

Right now I'm listening to Curve: Die like a dog...

Peace in a world
Free from religion
Peace in a world
Where everyone gets heaven..

Unfortunately, I'm too tired to listen to the next nine.

I was named after a Dead song.

My parents, however, claim they were not Deadheads, just regular fans. I'm not entirely sure I believe them.

PZ, Please come to Minneapolis to hang out more often. Ever heard "Insanity" by Oingo Boingo?

PZ Myers: Then perhaps you should turn it into "Friday Random Statistically Relevant Sample", no?

Classical is better than rock.

For a party?!!! Geez, remind me never to invite you.

...Fry, you can't just sit here in the dark and listen to classical music!

Hey, have you ever heard Four Tet's version of Black Sabbath's Iron Man? That's classical!

Hey, have you ever heard Four Tet's version of Black Sabbath's Iron Man?

Unfortunately not, just The Cardigans' version...

Anyone heard Frank Zappa's Finnish tango cover?

And speaking of classical music, there are always the Metallica covers by Apocalyptica...

Hedningarna - and other commenters in support, no less! Quelle surprise!

Richard Harris:

Listen to "And Then There Was Silence" and.. pretty much the entire Nightfall In Middle Earth album by Blind Guardian, "Ghost Love Score" from Nightwish (ignore the lyrics), The Gettysburg trilogy (The Devil to Pay, Hold at All Costs, High Water Mark), and pretty mich the entire "Dead Winter Dead" album by Savatage, and tell me that again with a straight face.

Or have I just stumbled across the first "classical snob" on the planet whose knowledge of popular music extends beyond the typical fare of MTV?

PS: The only classical snobs I know IRL are my amateur-on-a-technicality violinist grandfather and my essentially Christian Fundamentalist uncle. Neither of them, to my knowledge, has ever in their lives listened to a modern music genre before making up their minds about it.

Yup, classical is LIKE rock, except without the electric guitars and drum kits and country/blues/gospel foundation and yowling lead singers - but that's the point. If it gets you where it matters, does genre matter?

Nightwish is fun - Operatic Metal from Finland. (Damn those secularists!) Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# minor, ah yes, one of the first (and coolest) grown-up piano pieces I ever learned. The Sunken Cathedral, now we're talking. Now did you know that piece was copped by Renaissance for the backing to one of the songs from their "Ashes Are Burning" LP?

While we're on the French, I have to recommend Ravel's "Daphnis and Chloe". (Judging Ravel on his bolero is is like judging the Beatles on a Ringo song like "Don't Pass Me By" - Bolero was an exercise in orchestration that Ravel himself characterized as "notes without music." Bolero resonates only when played in the presence of Bo Derek. Heh.)

Gah... too many great pieces to mention, especially on a Monday morning. I hope all y'all had a great weekend of moving music and lusty pirating.

Four Tet is the coolest! I had to shoot him once for my magazine. super nice guy.
Crazy talented.

"And speaking of classical music, there are always the Metallica covers by Apocalyptica..."

Don't forget "Third Eye Open": Tool songs given the stringed instrumental treatment!

"If I thought I could make it from the UK I'd bring Dark Tranquility and more Novembre than you could shake a squid at..."

Ahhh, Dark Tranquility. I saw them in concert with Opeth and Devil Driver in Edmonton. Damn good show! (What I can remember of it, anyways) Considering the content of the conversation here, I'm kind of surprised nobody's mentioned Opeth yet. "The Drapery Falls" is one of the best metal songs ever. BTW, shouldn't that comment be "more Novembre than you could shake a kraken at..."?