Salsatic Vibrato III

"South of Hell's Borders"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

And now we come to my favorite volume of Salsatic Vibrato, and in fact one my favorite volumes of all my mixes.  It’s just such a fantastic collection of tracks which are all pitch-perfect for this mix.  And we start it all off with “Sing, Sing, Sing.”

“Sing, Sing, Sing” has been called the “swing anthem,” and for good reason.  It has everything that epitomizes the genre, and it’s insanely popular.  It’s been in two of the four movies we talked about as being at least partially responsible for the popularity of retro-swing,¹ and dozens of others.  There are countless versions of it, and pretty much every retro-swing band has at least one song that sounds just like it.  Its reputation is well-deserved.

Now, typically, I prefer retro-swing remakes over originals when it comes to classic swing tunes, so when I decided to include “Sing, Sing, Sing,” I listened to a lot of versions of it.  But the thing is, nothing beats the Benny Goodman version.  Now, it’s not the original version, despite the fact it’s the one most people think of as the original.  But the original is actually a Louis Prima song, with words.  Really stupid words, but words.  Prima, in fact, is a bit of a swing godfather: he did the original “Jump Jive an’ Wail” from Salsatic Vibrato I, and of course his famous song from The Jungle Book, which we’ll see next volume.  But while Louis Prima is amazing at writing swing songs, he’s not really that great at performing them, which is why Benny Goodman smoked him with his own song not a year and a half after Prima originally released it.  Goodman’s clarinet playing is part of the reason, for sure, but let’s not kid ourselves: it’s Gene Krupa’s fantastic work on the toms that makes the song.  Distinctive, electrifying, driving ... it gets under your skin and doesn’t let go.

For the rest of the set, there’s plenty of old friends come back for more.  Cherry Poppin’ Daddies with another great tune off Zoot Suit Riot,² Lou Bega with another track off Little Bit of Mambo, and Movits! with another one off Appelknyckarjazz.  For Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, we’re branching out; they don’t really have any other full albums as good as Americana Deluxe, but there are plenty of great individual tracks, such as the one we use here.  We have a similar situation with the Brian Setzer Orchestra, straying from The Dirty Boogie to what is certainly their best song not off that album and one of their best tracks all around.³  Contrariwise, for the Squirrel Nut Zippers we go back to their best—Hot—for their biggest hit: “Hell.” I’d avoided using it on the first two volumes because it seemed like too obvious a choice, but it really is just a great tune and doesn’t deserve to be overlooked just for the crime of being popular.

Plus we have plenty of new friends.  One of my favorite discoveries in the retro-swing genre is the Atomic Fireballs.  John Bunkley’s voice is just so rich and gravelly.  Running a close second is Lee Press-On and the Nails.  LPN can be so campy and kitschy that it starts to cross a line, but they can also be brilliant.  And then there’s Asylum Street Spankers, which is where we really start to deviate from the swing revival umbrella.  Some of their songs are retro-swing, true, but others are more reminiscent of Squirrel Nut Zippers, still others are more country-fied,⁴ some are just raunchy fun,⁵ and some are nearly impossible to categorize.  The track here, “Digga Digga Doo,” is a remake of a song from a Broadway show from the 20’s.  BBVD also has a version, but the ASS version is better.⁶  We’ll hear from all three of these folks in future volumes of Salsatic Vibrato.⁷

Another out-of-the-blue discovery was Eight to the Bar, one of those bands who is mostly known in their local scene⁸ (which is the greater Boston area).  I first heard them on Pandora,⁹ and was intrigued.  Their style covers a fair amount of ground, from swing to that Motown-grounded 50’s sound that I tried to define last time.¹⁰  After listening to a hell of a lot of their songs, it turns out that there’s only a few that I actually like, but I like those quite a lot.  We’ll hear more from them as well.

Also introduced to me via Pandora are Imelda May and Caro Emerald.  Imelda May actually concentrates on that hardcore Motown/50’s rock sound,¹¹ but she has a few really brassy songs that fit perfectly here.  Caro Emerald, on the other hand, is one of Europe’s new-ish electro-swing acts,¹² combining swing, loungy jazz, and electro to forge something truly inspiring.  Her album Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor is highly recommended.

Of course, the masters of electro-swing (as far as I’m concerned) are from the birthplace of swing mash-ups, Sweden, the same country that brought us Movits!.  For electro-swing, it’s Koop.  When I first discovered their seminal work Koop Islands, I was totally blown away.  If you go backwards from there in their discography, they get more electro and less swing, but Islands is the perfect balance in my view.¹³  The selection I chose here has, atypically, vocals from two of Koop’s prolific stable of singers: Earl Zinger and Yukimi Nagano.  It’s a great song, which gives us our volume title as well as a magnificent clarinet solo.

But neither Koop nor Movits! can claim the title of Sweden’s most bizarre swing mash-up: that honor has to go to Diablo Swing Orchestra.  Remember the first time someone tried to explain to you about how Dread Zeppelin was a reggae band doing covers of Led Zeppelin songs with an Elvis impersonator for a singer?  This is going to be worse.  DSO is a swing-inflected metal band with an opera singer and a male vocalist who sings through a voice-distortion unit.  Now, swing and metal are already bizarre enough of a mash-up, but throwing the opera and the VDU into it means that most of the songs from this Swedish outfit just don’t work.¹⁴  But, when they do ... it’s glorious.  Completely indescribable.  Their track here, “A Tap Dancer’s Dilemma,” which is our centerpiece, is their very best.¹⁵

The ska this time around is brought to us primarily by old-school greats Madness, and another new discovery, the lesser-known Mad Caddies.  The Caddies are from Solvang, just up the coast from me, and concentrate on power-ska, but also have eclectic tendencies and do pleny of branching out.  There’s just a taste of their brilliance here in the bridge track to DSO, but we’ll hear more from them in other volumes and mixes.

The touch of salsa in this volume comes via Kid Creole in the Coconuts, who were contemporaries of Miami Sound Machine and had a similar style of dancy, latin pop: sort of disco-salsa, you might say.  I never cared for Kid Creole at the time, but in later years when I had grown to have a greater appreciation for the big band personalities who inspired them,¹⁶ I thought I’d give them another try.  Most of the music I found hadn’t grown on me.  But I picked a few tracks that were pretty good,¹⁷ and at least one that was great, which I included here.

Salsatic Vibrato III
[ South of Hell's Borders ]

“Sing, Sing, Sing” by Benny Goodman [Single]¹⁸
“Hell” by Squirrel Nut Zippers, off Hot
“Man with the Hex” by the Atomic Fireballs, off Torch This Place
“I'm Trumpin'” by Eight to the Bar, off Behind the Eight Ball
“That Man” by Caro Emerald, off Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor
“Why Me?” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, off Rattle Them Bones
“Bai Mir Bist du Schøn” by Lee Press-On and the Nails, off El Bando en Fuego!
“Digga Digga Doo” by Asylum Street Spankers, off Mercurial
“The Dirge” by Mad Caddies, off Keep It Going
“A Tap Dancer's Dilemma” by Diablo Swing Orchestra, off Sing Along Songs for the Damned & Delirious
“Big Bad Handsome Man” by Imelda May, off Love Tattoo
“House of Fun” by Madness, off Complete Madness [Compilation]
“The Glamorous Life (Club Edit)” by Sheila E., off The Glamorous Life
“The Most Expensive Girl in the World” by Lou Bega, off A Little Bit of Mambo
“The Lifeboat Party” by Kid Creole and the Coconuts [Single]
“Lilly” by Pink Martini, off Hang on Little Tomato
“Forces ... Darling” by Koop, off Koop Islands
“One More Night with You” by the Brian Setzer Orchestra, off Wolfgang's Big Night Out
“Ta på dig dansskorna” by Movits!, off Äppelknyckarjazz
“Mister White Keys” by Cherry Poppin' Daddies, off Zoot Suit Riot [Compilation]
“This Business of Love” by Domino, off The Mask [Soundtrack]

Total:  21 tracks,  77:26

The tracks that fill out this set are anything but filler.  First off is Sheila E.‘s über-classic “The Glamorous Life.” This song has it all: intelligent lyrics by Prince, salsa touches provided by Sheila E.‘s amazing percussion, and brass courtesy of one of those sax solos you only get from the 80’s ... they just don’t make ’em like that any more, more’s the pity.¹⁹

Pink Martini is another band in the same vein as Diablo Swing Orchestra or Kid Creole and the Coconuts for me: most of their stuff I don’t care for, but when they put out a winner, it really cooks.  Their music is sort of a cross between loungy jazz and world.²⁰  Generally, I like my world in the form of electro-world (what some call “ethnic electronica”), like Transglobal Underground or Thievery Corporation.  So the majority of Pink Martini’s non-English work doesn’t particularly excite me.  And even the English tunes are more often suited for a different mix,²¹ but “Lilly” is an unusually upbeat track for them and fits perfectly here.

Finally, to close out this great set, I go back to the soundtrack for The Mask, the same place I first heard “Hey Pachuco!”.²²  This time out it’s the almost loungy “Business of Love” by West Coast rapper Domino.  It’s a sly, brassy, fun tune and a great way to end the set.

Next time around, I think we’ll go lounging around.²³

⇐ Salsatic Vibrato II

Salsatic Vibrato IV ⇒

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1 Specifically, Swing Kids and Bright Young Things.

2 For some reason, I’ve always felt that “Mr. White Keys” was the spiritual cousin of SNZ’s “Bad Businessman,” which we saw on our first volume.

3 It is, in fact, off Wolfgang’s Big Night Out, in which every song reuses the tune of a piece of classical music.  See if you can guess which one “One More Night with You” is based on.

4 Some too much so.  There’s a couple of ASS tracks that I have to regularly skip lest they trigger my country music gag reflex.

5 As you might have guessed from their initials.

6 Not to mention includes a hot-jazz-jump-swing version of some very familiar movie music in the breakdown.  See if you can identify it.

7 And on other mixes as well.

8 Remember my definition of an obscure band: must have only skeletal entries or no entries at all on both AllMusic and Wikipedia.  Eight to the Bar definitely qualifies by that definition.

9 I don’t typically listen to Pandora—that is, not just sit and listen to it for entertainment—but as a music discovery service it’s tough to beat.

10 In reference to Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, about half of whose music falls into that category.

11 Man, I wish that style had a name.  Besides CPD and EttB and Imelda May, we still have Devil Doll to get to, so I’ll have to dance around my vague description all over again next volume.

12 Ms. Emerald is from the Netherlands.

13 Not that I want to discourage you from checking out their first two albums as well.  Both are very good, if not quite so good as Islands.

14 Well, maybe they’d work for me if I was a bigger fan of speed metal.  But I only dabble, at most.

15 Although they’ll crop up again on Salsatic Vibrato IV with one almost as good.

16 In particular, Cab Calloway.

17 This is one of the joys of buying music in the digital age.  In the old days, I would have never sprung for a full album of Kid Creole and the Coconuts, not even one of their greatest hits compilations.  But now that I can purchase individual tracks that I’ve pre-sampled, I can get just the stuff I like.

18 There’s like a million versions of this song out there, most of them free.  The one I linked you to is not bad.  Actually, the one I personally use is a five-minute one I found on YouTube.  You just have to convert it to MP3 and trim the dead air off the end.  But use any version you like.  Except I think the 8-minute versions—and even longer ones—make the volume too long.  Certainly it won’t fit on a CD any more if you go with one of those.

19 You want the “Club Edit” version of this track.  Like the 8-minute version of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” 9 minutes of “The Glamorous Life” falls under the rubric of “Too Much of a Good Thing.”

20 Singer China Forbes sings in 15 different languages, according to Wikipedia.

21 Which we shall come to in the fullness of time.

22 Which you may remember from Salsatic Vibrato II, although there I used the slightly different version off Royal Crown Revue’s own album.

23 Yes, I know I said that last time too.  But next time, for reals.

work work work ...

I’m going to have to miss another post this week.  I have a fair amount of work to do, of all stripes, and I just can’t seem to scrape together enough time to crank out a reasonable post.  The Mother and 3 out of 3 of our human children (and 1 out of 5 of our furry children) will be off without me during the upcoming week, so hopefully I can parlay that into a chance to get back to being ahead on blog posts for a change.  No promises, but it’s a worthy goal.

In the meantime, you’ll have to find some other corner of the Internet to amuse you.  But the Internet, being made of cats, is a vast place, so this should pose few problems for you.

Saladosity, Part 3: My Chosen Path

[This is the third post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]


So, if I don’t buy into any of the nutritional tribes I talked about last time, what is my personal food philosophy?  What is my diet?  (And remember: “diet” means the food that you eat all the time, not a temporary menu change for losing weight.)

Well, until about a year ago, I didn’t really have one.  I had managed to cut sodas out completely, almost by accident,¹ and I’d radically reduced my McDonald’s consumption,² but not eliminated it completely.  My beer intake had declined to the point of near-non-existence.  As a family, we were eating more organic foods and cutting out a lot of the pre-processed meals.  But there was no real guiding principle behind any of it.  Until one day, The Mother said, “let’s do Whole30.”

Now, Whole30 is a form of paleo, and I’ve already given you my views on the paleo tribe.  So, on the one hand, I wasn’t completely on board.  But, on the other, if I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it right, and, if The Mother is going to do something, it’s just easier to say I’m going to do it too.  So I started looking into it.  And it definitely has some upsides.

I’m not going to try to convince you do the Whole30 yourself—that’s above and beyond the scope of this series—but I’ll just give you a couple of reasons why I found it helpful.  Basically, the program involves cutting vast swaths of food types out of your diet, but only for 30 days: after that, you add them back in, slowly, preferably one at a time.  This allows your taste buds to “reset,” first of all.  If you’re like the vast majority of Americans, everything you eat is too salty and too sweet.  When you cut out all that stuff, everything tastes remarkably bland for about a week or so.  Then everything tastes fine again.  Then, when your 30 days is done, you’ll find that you can’t really go back to the same crap you were eating before, because it now tastes awful.  This is a good thing.

Your digestive system will reset as well.  There’s a decent number of things your body is simply tolerating right now.  Give your body (and in particular your gut) a chance to live without the constant bombardment of that stuff for a while, then, when you try to go back, your body will happily tell you just when to slow down.  You can listen to your body and trust it to know when things are bad for you ... but only after you recalibrate it to real food.

There’s also some stuff in the Whole30 program about not replacing things.  For instance, if pizza is your downfall, don’t just start making pizza with almond flour instead.  Almond flour is perfectly fine on the Whole30 plan.  But the point is to break your bad habits, and almond flour pizza or almond milk ice cream or sweet potato chips is not helping you do that.

But, as I say, my goal is not to convince you to try the Whole30 program.  Rather, I’d like to talk about what you can and can’t eat during that 30 day period and how I’ve modified that to suit my own needs.

So, the first thing to say is that when you look at what Whole30 wants you to cut out, it seems impossible.  In fact, it is technically impossible, unless you never eat out.  It’s just completely impractical to try to quiz your waiters to that level of detail about what’s in the food they’re serving you.³  But that’s okay.  Even if you’re only hitting 95% of your goals, you’re achieving a massive improvement in your diet.

Now let’s look at each category of things that they want you to cut out and see if we agree with where they’re coming from:

No added sugar of any kind.  This the big one.  It’s huge, in fact.  There are very few things you can buy at your grocery store that don’t contain any added sweeteners, even if you’re shopping at Whole Foods.  And companies have gotten insanely good at finding new names for sugar.  “Evaporated cane juice” is one of my favorites—it’s even more ridiculous than referring to water as “hydrogen dioxide.”  How do you think they make sugar, anyway?  But the main point here is that you’re not just cutting out high fructose corn syrup, which I think most people already agree is pretty terrible for you, but even the healthier versions: your honeys, your molasseses, your raw organic cane sugars.  I agree with this one, for the most part.  I was willing to give them all up for 30 days, and I’m still pretty selective in how much I allow currently.  Get used to food without all the extra sugar first, then you’ll be better able to keep your total amounts down.  In the salads that I’m going to show you, the amount of sugar or other sweeteners will be remarkably small (and zero for some of them).

No grains.  This is one is pretty damn big too.  Mainly because corn is a grain, and corn is also in just about everything you buy at the grocery store.  (This probably has something to do with the nearly 7 billion dollars per year in corn subsidies.)  This not about removing gluten from your diet;⁴ this is about all grains.  Whole30, being paleo, will tell you this is because primitive man never cultivated grains.  I say that’s a silly reason.  Better to focus on the fact that grains are nearly pure carbs, which are not only bad from the paleo standpoint, but even worse from the Atkins standpoint.  And the first thing your doctor will tell you cut down if you start developing diabetes.  My family has a fair amount of that in its history, so cutting out grains was a no-brainer for me.  Hard as hell, of course, but I couldn’t really argue with it.  There will be no grains of any kind in any of our salads.⁵

No legumes.  This is one of those things that doesn’t seem so bad at first.  No beans: well, I like beans, but I can live without them.  They’re pretty damn starchy, so I can’t really argue with the nutritional advantage.  No peanuts: now it’s starting to sting.  Peanut butter is one of the healthiest things I used to eat, really.  Shame to lose that.  But it turns out that cashew butter is pretty damn awesome, especially if you mix a little almond butter in it.  So I’m okay there.  But here’s the one you forgot was a legume: soybeans.  And soybeans are in just about everything in your grocery store that doesn’t have corn in it (and most things that do, as well).⁶  And the problem with soybeans is, first of all, the same as it is with corn: we just plain eat too much of it.  Even when something isn’t bad for you, eating massive quantities of the same thing is probably bad for you.  But, worse, soybeans (along with corn) are one of corporations’ favorite things to genetically modify, if you believe that that sort of thing is bad, plus there are new studies suggesting that the compounds in soy that mimic estrogen are pretty awful for us too.  So I’m down with cutting out soybean oil, as really really difficult as that may be.  None of the salads I present in this series will contain any legumes at all.

No dairy.  And here we hit the first place I disagree with Whole30 completely.  I actually don’t drink milk any more because I’ve become fairly lactose intolerant as I’ve gotten older.  But who can live without cheese?  I would miss sour cream as well, though I could live without it, but there’s also yogurt.  Assuming you’re managing to find yogurt which has not been infested with high fructose corn syrup (a difficult proposition, granted), that’s a pretty healthy product right there.  Also excellent in helping keep your digestive tract on ... well, track.  As I said last time, I’m unwilling to give up dairy just because cavemen hadn’t gotten around to domesticating cows yet.  So there will be cheese⁷ in some of these salads.  But often that will be easy to omit if you don’t agree with me on this one.

No alcohol.  Twaddle.  First of all, new studies show that alcohol in moderation can actually help reduce your risk of a heart attack.  But for me it’s not really about drinking.  It’s practically impossible to go out to eat without encountering some sort of sauce containing wine—especially if the restaurant is Italian.  Hell, even most dijon mustard has wine in it.⁸  Now, I still respect the restriction on grains, which means no beer (or not very often anyway).  Also no whiskey or derivatives, and no rum (’cause, you know: sugar).  But vodka and tequila and gin are okay ... and wine.  Still, there will only be alcohol in any of our salads if your particular brand of dijon has wine in it.

No fries or chips.  Originally this rule was no potatoes.  But then they realized that it meant people were avoiding relatively healthy things like potato leek soup and aloo gobi and just eating sweet potato chips and sweet potato fries instead.⁹  Not ideal.  I mostly respect this—I’ve cut potato chips down to no more than once a week, and fries to even less than that.  But there won’t be any chips or fries (or potatoes, for that matter) in our salads.

No carageenan, MSG, or sulfites.  Well, first of all, there are natural sulfites in wine, and also balsamic vinegar.  But those are not the sulfites that Whole30 is attempting to ban.¹⁰  It’s the sulfites used as preservatives.  In fact, this whole rule is about avoiding food additives, as far as I’m concerned.  There’s lots of debates about this sort of thing, and “additives are bad” is a bit like “drugs are bad” (which is to say, lumping all of them together is pretty silly).  Nonetheless, simpler is better in my opinion, so additives in our salads will be few to none.


So that’s what I got out of the Whole30 plan in terms of nutritional goals for myself, and my salads.  My nutritional philosophy isn’t really Whole30, or even paleo at all.  Or any other tribe.  It doesn’t have a name, and I don’t feel compelled to give it one.  I don’t follow it slavishly, and you needn’t follow it all, if you have your own ideas.  Or you can feel free to follow it partially: adopt some of my salads and reject others.  Personally, I’m pretty happy with this level of selectivity: it cuts out a lot of things which are most likely bad for me, but completely eliminates hardly anything.  I tend to believe in “everything in moderation,” but moderation can mean pretty small amounts of some things, and pretty hefty amounts of others.  Preferably all-natural organic others.

And at least now you know where I’m coming from.

Next time, we’ll go shopping.

__________

1 Which is an amusing story in itself, but too long to go into here.

2 Thank you, Morgan Spurlock.

3 And likely they wouldn’t admit to every last ingredient anyway.

4 Although I’ve tried avoiding gluten as well, even after reintroducing grains into my diet.  It doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference for me personally, but it does for The Mother.  So that’s something you’ll have to experiment with yourself.

5 Okay, technically speaking, the shredded cheese I use for one salad has corn starch in it to prevent caking.  But I’m willing to allow that much.

6 If you need more sources than just me to tell you that nearly everything you buy in your grocery store contains either corn or soy or both, I’m happy to oblige.  But just go read labels.  It won’t take you long to figure out this is correct.

7 And other dairy as well.  But mostly cheese.

8 Not all, admittedly.

9 I know I was.

10 They already banned wine with the “no alcohol” rule and vinegar is an explicitly listed exception to the rules.

Saladosity, Part 2: The Nutritional Tribes

[This is the second post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]


First of all, let me say that I don’t particularly subsribe to any one nutritional philosophy.  Much like religion.  Gandhi once said:

I came to the conclusion long ago ... that all religions were true and also that all had some error in them, ...

The same is true of the various camps on nutrition, as far as I’m concerned.  In fact, people treat nutritional philosophy a lot like religion: if you’ve ever had a friend go all Atkins on you, you know very well that’s it’s hard to distinguish that from their having joined a cult.  But, I’m not going to get anywhere trying to convince you that your favorite nutritional evangelist is really a televangelist.  So let’s not call them “cults” ... let’s call them “tribes.”

So I believe the various tribes are all right, a bit, and all wrong, a bit.  The truth of the matter is that the complexities of the way nutrition is absorbed by the human body are so intricate, and they vary so widely across individuals, that even as much as we know about biology and science, we still don’t know exactly what’s good for us to eat and what’s bad.  We have ideas, true, but unfortunately many of the ideas are contradictory.  Also, many of them are most probably wrong.  Too bad we don’t know which ones.

And so we’re presented with a bewildering barrage of information with no clear way to choose which bits to rely on, and it constantly changes.  Remember when cholesterol was bad for you?  Well, now only some of it is bad for you.  Remember when milk was the most awesome thing you could drink?  Now it’s full of fat and complicated by lactose intolerance.  Remember how butter was terrible for you and margarine was the savior?  Now margarine is Satan because it contains trans fat and butter looks pretty healthy in comparison.  Whenever anyone tells you that this or that food is “bad” for you, you can almost bank on the fact that, if you wait five or ten years, it’ll be good for you again.

Amidst all this data flying at you, groups will agglomerate certain facts, conveniently ignore others, and announce that they now hold all the secrets.  The majority of these have a rationale that sounds perfectly sensible, so it’s easy to fall under their sway.  The trick is to remember that nutrition is often counter-intuitive, and to question everything.  I’m going to briefly cover what I consider to be the most important of the nutritional tribes (in no particular order), and I’m gong to tell you what I buy and what I question.  These are only my opinions.  I might throw in a few links here and there, but I’m not trying to convince you to believe what I believe, especially since what I believe changes fairly regularly.  I just want to you hear my reasoning, and hopefully convince you to question things for yourself.

The Low-Fat Tribe

I sometimes call this the Weight Watchers tribe,¹ but that’s an oversimplification.  Lots more folks than just Weight Watchers believe in the siren call of low-fat.  The rational here is pretty simple: if you don’t want to be fat, stop eating food that contain fat.  An offshoot of this tribe is the low-calorie tribe, which is so similar I just lump them both together.  The low-calorie rationale is only slightly more complex: you consume X calories, and you burn off Y calories.  If X is bigger than Y, those extra calories turn into fat.  If Y is bigger, you lose weight.

Where I think these guys get it right is in their emphasis on exercise.  You really do need to burn some calories or you’re not going to get very far.  Besides, exercise is not only important for losing weight: there are plenty of other health benefits to be gained from reducing your sedentary time.

But the questionable bits here are pretty questionable.  Recently a lot of nutritional folks are saying that not all calories are created equal, and that fat doesn’t actually make you fat.²  Rather, it’s sugar and carbs that make you fat.  Some folks will even go so far as to say that reducing fat intake can be less healthy for you, if you’re reducing certain types of fat.  (But of course no one will agree on which fats are which.  Except everyone agrees that trans fat is evil.)

The Atkins Tribe

The natural reaction to information that fat isn’t bad for you but carbs are is to create a new tribe.  The Atkins folks have the most complicated rationale of any of the tribes (which is why it sounds the most cult-like).  There’s a lot of stuff about glucose and ketosis and it sounds all science-y and cool.  And it absolutely is based on actual science.

The good parts of Atkins are that carbs really are evil ... or at least mostly evil.  Lots of folks, even outside the Atkins tribe, are now agreeing on this, particularly as regards refined sugars and refined flours.  Reducing carbs also seems to help with diabetes, which is one of the major health issues with being fat.

On the other hand, cutting out all carbs is not sensible, and some folks have claimed it isn’t healthy either.  Looking at it from the opposite angle, I agree that fat can be good for you, but that doesn’t mean I agree that consuming all the fat you can stomach is good for you.  And all that meat ... too much meat makes me feel vaguely ill, and if that’s not a danger sign, I don’t know what is.

The Paleo Tribe

The paleo folks have taken a riff on the Atkins philosophy and then doubled down on it: it’s not the carbs that are bad, per se, it’s the grains.  Also the starchy vegetables, and the diary ... basically, if cavemen didn’t eat it, you shouldn’t either.  The rationale here, as usual, sounds pretty believable: the diet of our primitive ancestors was, by definition, the most natural diet we’ve ever had.  Every technological advance took us farther and farther away from that ideal.

Rejection of preservatives and sweeteners and suchlike is the best advice from the paleo tribe, in my opinion.  Folks can say all they want that there are no studies proving that all our modern food additives are to blame for all our modern health issues, but the fact that we didn’t have the health problems when we didn’t have the additives is pretty hard to argue with.  The way I see it, it’s entirely possible that sodium benzoate is perfectly safe.  But it’s also entirely possible that it ain’t.  Do I really need it that bad?³

The problems with the paleo tribe is, again, going too far.  No dairy?  Really?  Yogurt and cheese might well be the most healthy things I ever ate, before I got onto my salad kick.  Do I really want to eliminate all dairy just because cavemen hadn’t manage to domesticate cows yet?  Also, there’s sort of a giant flaw in all this: who wants to have the life expectancy of a caveman?

The Vegan Tribe

The vegetarians and vegans are possibly the most interesting group of all.  Lately they’ve almost entirely given up on trying to convince us that cutting out meat is more healthy, and concentrated instead on pointing out that it’s a hell of a lot cheaper, uses less water and energy, and produces a hell of a lot fewer greenhouse gases, if we put our time and energy into growing crops to eat instead of growing them to feed herbivores so we can eat them instead.  All of which is hard to argue with.  Also, cows, and pigs, and chickens are cute, and we should probably stop torturing them.

There are lots of studies that suggest that reducing meat in our diet can be healthy.  Unfortunately, nearly all those studies are contested on some grounds or other.  For instance, if a study suggests that people who eat more meat are more likely to get cancer, someone is bound to come along and point out that the most likely reason for that is that meat tends to get overcooked more, and we already know that burned stuff is carcinogenic.  And, honestly, that sounds pretty logical.  Still, I can’t deny that I don’t feel good when I eat too much meat, or eat it too often, and I know for a fact that cutting back my meat intake is the surest way to guarantee that I lose weight.

Again, though, elimination of all meat just feels like going too far to me.  I love animals, and I really don’t want to see any of them mistreated.  But I also know that a carnivore is a carnivore, and animals eating each other is a perfectly natural part of life.  And we are animals, and we most definitely are carnivores.  Watch a documentary on chimpanzees sometime.  They don’t eat meat all that often, but, when they get a hankering for it, the results are ... bloody.  There are also plenty of studies that show that the protein from meat is crucial to our diet (those are also always contested, of course).

The Other Tribes

This list isn’t exhaustive, of course.  It isn’t meant to be.  It’s just designed to cover what I feel are the most convincing viewpoints out there, and why I think they’ve all got something going for them ... and yet I’m not completely sold on any of them.  But there are plenty more folks out there who claim to have The Way and The Light when it comes to knowing what you should eat.  There’s the juicing tribe, and the fasting tribe, and the raw tribe, and the Weston A. Price tribe, and oh-so-many-more.  All of them sound very convincing—at the very least in that late-night-infomercial way that sounds good at first, but can break down after you examine it later a bit more critically.  Many of them even hold up after careful scrutiny, just to disappoint you with mediocre results when you try them out personally.  There’s a lot of reasons for this, many of which I mentioned above.  But the biggest one is this:

People are all different.

Oh, we’re all the same, too,⁴ but we’re certainly all different, often in very fundamental ways.  And I’m not just talking personalities here.  We’re biologically—genetically—different.  And we start out different and get differenter as we go along—as some of us get diseases others don’t, some are subjected to stresses which subtly alter our internal processes and some aren’t, some of suffer injuries that change our bodies in fundamental ways while others never even suffer a scratch—until it’s frankly amazing that doctors can treat people at all, that biology doesn’t just throw up its hands and go “the answer to everything is: it depends!”  It’s one of those cool things that makes us stand out as individuals—even identical twins can be distinguished by people who know them well.  But every upside has its downside, and the downside of this one is that you’re always going to run into advice of a medical or biological or anatomical—or nutritional—nature that simply won’t work for you.  That doesn’t make it bad advice, necessarily (though certainly a lot of it is just that), it just means it doesn’t work for you.

And absolutely that applies to my advice as well.  Take it all with many many grains of salt, modify it to suit yourself, question it and test it and disparage it as you will.  But I think there’s some value in some of it, sometimes, for some people, so I’m going to keep on prattling on about it.

Next time I tell you what my personal goals are in designing my salads (and some of my oher meals too), so you can better know which of my advice to take to heart and which to throw out on the grounds that I’m insane.

1 I did so in our last installment, even.

2 I could link you to several articles, but, again: question everything.

3 Let me stress that I’m perfectly willing to risk purely hypothetical dangers if there’s some benefit from it.  I’m just not seeing the benefits here.

4 As I explained both in my views on balance and paradox and individuality.

Rose-Coloured Brainpan I

"Billion Year-Old Carbon"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]


In the beginning,¹ there was a mix called Depression, which I would play when I was in a bad mood.  There were two problems with this:  First, it was a bit too on-the-nose.  That is, 90 minutes² of continuous, depressing music is not helpful when you’re already depressed.  And, if you’re not depressed, it’ll just make you depressed.  Secondly, not all the music on this mix was actually depressing.  It was all slow, sure, and full of minor keys, but, even so: it turns out that music is quite good at doing different shades of “depressing.”

Next came Wisty Mysteria, which was one of the pre-modern mixes.³  As I explained when discussing my penchant for bizarrely named mixes in the first place, “Wisty Mysteria” is supposed to convey the concepts of “wistful” and “mysterious” at the same time, plus a few more for good measure.⁴  These tunes weren’t really depressing, but they filled a space that Depression used to ... at least partially.

And now we’ve arrived at April 2002, which is when I watched episode 7 of season 2 of Six Feet Under, titled “Back to the Garden.”  The episode was named after the lyrics of “Woodstock” by Joni Mitchell, and featured that song in a central role.  Now, chances are that I’d heard this song before, but I likely dismissed it because I’m not that huge a fan of the seventies.  There’s a few bits of it I like,⁵ and a few bits I don’t mind so much, but as a general rule I consider it the low point in the history of rock.  So every now and I again I can still be pleasantly surprised to rediscover some 70s gem.  Like this one.

“Woodstock” is not so much wistful as nostalgic.  That’s a subtle distinction, but I knew right away that this tune would not fit in with the rest of Wisty Mysteria.  Those songs have a sense of longing, often for something that you can’t really put your finger on.  This song—this mix—is about reimagining the past to suit the needs of the present.  Although it’s entirely possible to appreciate the lyrics of “Woodstock” without ever thinking about its eponymous festival, it’s also worth noting that this is a song about Woodstock written by someone who wasn’t there and always regretted missing the opportunity.  The resulting hyperpoetic romanticization is emblematic of the mood that this mix projects.⁶

So what we end up with is a collection that’s mellow, certainly, but not that depressing.  I don’t really even make mixes that are completely sad any more, but Rose-Coloured Brainpan isn’t even as downbeat as Wisty Mysteria, or Tenderhearted Nightshade.⁷  This is music about examining memory and retrofitting it: a little bit nostalgia, a little bit regret, a little bit wishful thinking.  To see the world through rose-coloured glasses means to put an optimistic spin on things ... even when those things don’t really deserve it.  And if the “things” in question are memories, the bits of flotsam one finds in the bottom of one’s neurological oilpan, perhaps ...

Unlike many of my mixes, there’s no set of bands or albums that dominate this mix, although there are certainly a few that lend themselves to it.  The first time I ever heard August and Everything After, for instance, I didn’t particularly care for it.  Too wimpy, and I really didn’t like “Mr. Jones.”  Still don’t, for that matter, but I’ve come to appreciate that the annoyingly pervasive single was the worst song on that album, and what I perceived as wimpiness was actually a quiet, mellow brilliance.  “Round Here,” with its opening lyrics

Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog, where no one notices the contrast of white on white.

is just too perfect to pass up for this mix, as is the lush, not-quite-goth of Peter Murphy’s “Marlene Dietrich’s Favourite Poem” from Deep, which contains nonsensical but strangely haunting phrases such as “sad eyed pearl and drop lips.”  The former Bauhaus front-man put out a moody, atmospheric album that I fell in love with as soon as I picked it up off the strength of “Cuts You Up.”  And our old friends from Smokelit Flashback, Naomi, are back with a rare vocal track, “October,” whose thoughtful, almost surreal, lyrics are, again, perfect here.

On the other hand, some of my other choices are from unlikely sources.  If you know the reggae-tinged alt-dance of Escape Club,⁸ you may not expect the pining quality of “Only the Rain.”  And if you know the upbeat punk-pop of Tuscadero,⁹ you may find “Nancy Drew” surprisingly reflective, if still pretty peppy.

Which brings me to another important point about this mix: not all the songs are slow songs.  In fact, after the classic Smiths bridge “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want,”¹⁰ which is about as close to depressing as this mix gets, I launch into a far more upbeat set, starting with the Smithereens’ sixties-throwback-tune “Groovy Tuesday,” off their killer album Especially for You,¹¹ then proceeding through the aforementioned “Nancy Drew” into “No Regrets” by Dramarama, the almost upbeat “Tread Lightly” from Kirsty MacColl, and finally winding down with OMD’s quirky “Women III” off Crush.  Both “No Regrets” and “Women III” are self-critical examinations of a life from a female perspective as sung by male singers, so interposing the bittersweet “Tread Lightly” between them seemed almost a necessity.  All three of those source albums¹² are among my favorites, for different reasons.  They have very different styles, but somehow this set of songs seems to flow very well.

Winding down the volume is “A Month of Sundays,” one of the few songs that can reliably make me cry if I sing along with it.  I picked up Building the Perfect Beast in my freshman year in college on the strength of the poppy hits “The Boys of Summer” and “All She Wants to Do Is Dance,” but ex-Eagle Don Henley has a mellower, serious side as well.  Perhaps it’s because three of my four grandparents were raised on farms that this song strikes such a chord with me.  But maybe it’s just the strength of Henley’s touching portrait of an old farmer who seems a bit lost in the modern world.

And, finally, “Dust and a Shadow,” which closes out Shriekback’s Go Bang!, also concludes this volume.  This track is one of the few moments on Go Bang! that echoes earlier albums such as Big Night Music, and I always thought it was very pretty.

The mix starter also provides the volume title.  We are stardust.

Rose-Coloured Brainpan I
    [Billion Year-Old Carbon]

        “Woodstock” by Joni Mitchell, off Ladies of the Canyon
        “Can't Find My Way Home” by Swans, off The Burning World
        “Marlene Dietrich's Favourite Poem” by Peter Murphy, off Deep
        “October” by Naomi, off Pappelallee
        “Round Here” by Counting Crows, off August and Everything After
        “So gone” by Myles Cochran, off Marginal Street
        “Only the Rain” by Escape Club, off Wild Wild West
        “Girls' Room” by Liz Phair, off Whitechocolatespaceegg
        “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” by The Smiths, off Pretty in Pink [Soundtrack]
        “Groovy Tuesday” by The Smithereens, off Especially for You
        “Nancy Drew” by Tuscadero, off The Pink Album
        “No Regrets” by Dramarama, off Stuck in Wonderamaland
        “Tread Lightly” by Kirsty MacColl, off Kite
        “Women III” by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, off Crush
        “A Month of Sundays” by Don Henley, off Building the Perfect Beast
        “Dust and a Shadow” by Shriekback, off Go Bang!
   

Total:  16 tracks,  66:32

The other tracks here are mostly unsurprising.  While I don’t find The Burning World to be the equal of Love of Life in general, there’s no doubt that the Swans’ cover of Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home” is one of Jarboe’s finest vocal moments, and it flows so beautifully after “Woodstock” (and also drifts seamlessly into “Marlene Dietrich’s Favourite Poem”).  Liz Phair’s spare arrangement on whitechocolatespaceegg‘s closer “Girl’s Room” serves as a fantastic winding down of the quieter first set on this volume, working as a bridge to the bridge of “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want.”

And finally I’ll mention Myles Cochran, who is one of the artists I discovered through Magnatune.  I found Magnatune while exploring darkwave, because they’re the primary label for Falling You.¹³  Unlike those labels which epitomize one particular style of music, Magnatune is all over the map.  Cochran is described on their site as “alt-country”; although country is the one style of popular music that I can’t stand, apparently I’m okay with alt-country.¹⁴  Definitely Cochran’s easy-going style has a lot of twang to it, but it never crosses the line for me.  “So Gone” is one of the best tracks on this album, which you should hop over to Magnatune and check out: you can listen to the entire album for free.  In fact, you can listen to all their albums for free.  As their motto proudly proclaims: they are not evil.

Next time around,¹⁵ we’ll take a step back to look at one of my all-time favorite volumes.

Rose-Coloured Brainpan II ⇒

__________

1 By which I mean in the mid-eighties.

2 This was before CDs, so I made my mixes to fit on a 90-minute cassette.

3 Meaning we’re still talking about cassettes as opposed to digital playlists, but at least by now I was recording off of CDs.

4 I’m sure we’ll cover the full gamut once we reach Wisty Mysteria in our series.

5 Primarily the Doors and the Eagles, I’d say.

6 Admittedly, sometimes it’s difficult to figure out whether a song should land on Rose-Coloured Brainpan or Wisty Mysteria, and I have a couple that regularly float back and forth as I change my mind on where they belong.

7 Both of which we’ll come to in the fullness of time.

8 Most famous as one-hit wonders for their hit “Wild Wild West”.

9 Known—as far as they were known at all—for songs like “Latex Dominatrix” and “Candy Song.”

10 Which, at under 2 minutes, I’ve used to fill small gaps at the ends of mix tapes for years.

11 Which I believe was another of my finds at Unicorn Records, which I mentioned back in Smokelit Flashback II.

12 That is, Stuck in Wonderamaland, Kite, and Crush.

13 Whom you may recall we discussed back in Smokelit Flashback II.

14 Remember from Smokelit Flashback I that I also mentioned I like Chris Isaak.

15 Remember, not necessarly next week.

Going to the birthday well again

Well, it’s the end of another March birthday season, and I’m right in the midst of my youngest child’s first birthday weekend that she’s old enough to talk for.  She doesn’t quite have a feel for the power yet: she caught on to “yeah! it’s my birthday!” quickly enough, but when we ask her what she wants to do or eat next, she just says “nuffin’.”

As I write this, I’m at the park near our house.  You would think that would have been a no-brainer, but we had to work hard to convince her to go along with this plan, which is necessary to give The Mother the opportunity to get the tea party ready.  My little girl likes her tea parties.

After tea, we’ll head off to the mall to that place where you make your own teddy bear (’cause my little girl likes her stuffed animals),^* then tomorrow it’s off to ride a pony (’cause my little girl likes her horsies).  Another thing my little girl apparently likes is The Monster at the End of This Book, which she is now listening to over and over and over again on her new Amazon Fire with Freetime.  I used to like that book myself.  Now it’s starting to get a little old.

Anyway, as I am a slave to a three-year-old, I have no time to spit out blog posts for you, dear reader, and, while I was almost successful in my attempts to get a week ahead (you’ll notice I did not lose a week at the beginning of the March birthday season, when the Smaller Animal had his weekend), I fell behind again last week, with the end result that now I’m living blog-post-to-blog-post again.  Perhaps I’ll be able to crank out a double next week so that I can be ahead of the game once again.

In the meantime, you’ll have to be content with my observations that cucumber-and-cream-cheese tea sandwiches are surprisingly delicious, that a dozen helium balloons from the dollar store are utter hell to stuff into a closet, and that if I have to listen to Grover whine about my daughter knocking down his solid, strong, brick wall one more time I’m going to have to wring his lovable furry old neck.  Surely that’s enough to tide you over.

* Actually, as it turned out, the tea party was quite exhausting, so teddy bear building had to be postponed.

Salsatic Vibrato II

"King of the Monkeys"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Just as with the first two volumes of Smokelit Flashback, the first two Salsatic Vibrato’s were developed simultaneously.  I was very into retro-swing at the time,¹ so I had no shortage of tracks, and there was plenty there for two full CD’s worth by the time I got to organizing.  So, it shouldn’t suprise to see many of the same names back for more: Big Bad Voodoo Daddy provides a whopping 3 tracks (just on the verge of too much), all from the same album as before (Americana Deluxe); Joe Jackson returns with another track off Jumpin’ Jive; and Movits! too is back, with two more tracks from mainstay Appelknyckarjazz.  And we get Lou Bega’s big hit off Little Bit of Mambo.

And of course our old pals Cherry Poppin’ Daddies.  CPD is a much more interesting case than the other retro-swing bands, because they’re not actually a retro-swing band.  Actually, they have a very eclectic style that goes from retro-swing to power ska to something that can only be described as hardcore-inflected 50’s rock.²  Only 2 or 3 songs on each of the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies’ first few albums were full-on retro-swing.  So what exactly is Zoot Suit Riot, you may ask?  Simple: it’s a compilation album.  Released by CPD’s label in what I imagine was a desperate attempt to cash in on the burgeoning retro-swing craze, it collected just the retro-swing tracks from their first 3 albums, and ended up achieving far more popularity than any of the albums it compiled.  Popularity is good, but unfortunately it meant that people ended up getting the wrong impression of the Daddies.  Wikipedia suggests that the band members themselves may have regretted Zoot Suit Riot; I bet it wasn’t a pleasant experience to have legions of new fans pissed off at you for “changing your direction” when what you’re actually doing is the exact same thing you’ve always done.  Although I too am one of those folks who don’t particularly appreciate the Daddies’ non-retro-swing tracks as much, I do absolutely respect their very wide range of styles and their ability to transmogrify themselves completely from one track to the next.³  In the meantime, though, you’ll have to be satisfied with “Zoot Suit Riot” here, which is after all one of their greatest tracks.

I can’t neglect Squirrel Nut Zippers either.  This time I’m branching out from Hot (even though that’s my all-time favorite SNZ album) to touch on some of their great tracks from other albums.  As I’ve mentioned before, the Zippers aren’t truly retro-swing, so not all of their tracks fit well into the Salsatic Vibrato mold.  But the two here—“Baby Wants a Diamond Ring,” off Bedlam Ballroom, and “Suits Are Picking Up the Bill,” off Perennial Favorites—rock pretty hard.

But one of the best things about this mix is the 1-2-3 punch that kicks it off.  Every once in a while you just hit on a magic combination of tracks that feels so natural that, if you hear one track in some other context, you automatically hear the opening strains of the next track in your head as soon as it’s over.  This set is one of those.  It leads off with “Mambo Swing” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, which also provides the volume title.  Then it slams into “Livin’ la Vida Loca” by Ricky Martin.  Now, don’t get me wrong: I do not like Ricky Martin.  Neither do I like Boys II Men or One Direction or New Kids on the Block or any other such crap.  But this one song is just awesome.  Oh, sure, I got sick of it when it was popular, like everyone else in the known universe.  But, once it stopped being everywhere you turned around, and I heard it again in isolation, I started to appreciate it: the funky bassline, the trumpets, the latin flair, the lyrics which were surprisingly non-trite.  Coming off “Mambo Swing,” which is easily the most salsa-inflected thing BBVD has done, it fits beautifully.  And then it rollicks along into “Sly,” by the Cat Empire.  Cat Empire is an Australian band, but this album was recorded in Havana, and it shows.  I’d never heard of them before Damian played them for me on WRNR, but “Sly” just blew me away.  The album is decent enough⁴ but that one song really kicks it.  These three tracks right in a row really put the “salsa” in “Salsatic Vibrato.”

Toward the middle of the volume, there’s another pairing I’m rather fond of.  “What’s the Use of Getting Sober (When You’re Gonna Get Drunk Again)” (our track from Jumpin’ Jive this time out) is really too slow for this mix, but the joy I got from snuggling it up to “You & Me & the Bottle Makes 3 Tonight (Baby)” is just too sweet to pass up.⁵

The ska this time around is more spread out.  There are two tracks from Reel Big Fish: their excellent radio hit “Sell Out” and their inspired remake of “Take on Me.”⁶  Another track from the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and another from Save Ferris keep the ska vibe going throughout.

You can also see that I picked up the soundtrack for Swing.  There are four movies that I know of which are given credit for helping out the retro-swing movement: Swing Kids and Bright Young Things we mentioned last time, and they’re at either end of a ten-year-span (1993 to 2003).  Then there’s Swingers, which came out in 1996; it didn’t really have much to do with swing music per se, but it featured Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, so it gets some credit.  But the best of the batch is Swing, which came along in 1999.  When I say “best” I don’t necessarily mean cinematically best, but best in terms of highlighting the music.  It’s a British flick about a former criminal who gets out of jail and decides to go straight.  His biggest problem is not having many marketable skills.  But he can play the saxophone ...  It’s really not a blad flick, and the music is excellent, sung by Georgie Fame and Lisa Stansfield (the latter of whom also stars in the movie).  The track I pulled here is a remake of the 1946 Louis Jordan tune that gave us the (admittedly useless) phrase “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens.” It’s a silly song, but it’s a lot of fun, and it’s got a great sax break in it.

Salsatic Vibrato II
[ King of the Monkeys ]

“Mambo Swing” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, off Americana Deluxe
“Livin' la Vida Loca” by Ricky Martin, off Livin' la Vida Loca [CD Single⁷]
“Sly” by the Cat Empire, off Two Shoes
“Äppelknyckarjazz” by Movits!, off Äppelknyckarjazz
“Baby Wants a Diamond Ring” by Squirrel Nut Zippers, off Bedlam Ballroom
“Sell Out” by Reel Big Fish, off Turn the Radio Off
“What's the Use of Getting Sober (When You're Gonna Get Drunk Again)” by Joe Jackson, off Jumpin' Jive
“You & Me & the Bottle Makes 3 Tonight (Baby)” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, off Americana Deluxe
“The Rascal King” by Mighty Mighty Bosstones, off Let's Face It
“Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit of ...)” by Lou Bega, off A Little Bit of Mambo
“The World Is New” by Save Ferris, off It Means Everything
“Fel del av gården” by Movits!, off Äppelknyckarjazz
“Mr. Pinstripe Suit” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, off Americana Deluxe
“Zoot Suit Riot” by Cherry Poppin' Daddies, off Zoot Suit Riot [Compilation]
“Ain't Nobody Here but Us Chickens” by Lisa Stansfield, off Swing [Soundtrack]
“Suits Are Picking Up the Bill” by Squirrel Nut Zippers, off Perennial Favorites
“Swing Out” by Swingerhead, off She Could Be a Spy
“Hey Pachuco!” by Royal Crown Revue, off Mugzy's Move
“Take on Me” by Reel Big Fish, off BASEketball [Soundtrack]

Total:  19 tracks,  66:17

Two other things I’ll mention before I close.

First of all, note that I’ve included cover images (both front and back) for this volume.  I often have a vague concept for a cover image when I work on a mix: there’s a recurring element which will be on every volume (or perhaps it will be the background of each one), and then there’s the volume-specific imagery, which is tied to the volume title.  Usually these are just mental pictures that will never exist in the real world.  But then, every now and again, I actually sit down with the Gimp and go scouring the Internet looking for clip art and photos to cobble together.  As it happens, I’ve done all of the first four volumes of Salsatic Vibrato in order to make physical CDs for a friend of mine.  And I figured, why not share them with you too?⁸  (The fact that the monkey I chose for the “King of the Monkeys” is King Louie from The Jungle Book is a bit of an inside joke.  Louie was voiced by Louis Prima, who penned many of the great swing songs, including “Jump, Jive an’ Wail”—seen on our last volume—and “Sing Sing Sing,” which we’ll see next time.⁹)

Lastly, a brief digression on the concept of “hardening.” I start making a mix by adding song titles to a text file.  On every line, the first 3 columns are reserved for characters that help me keep track of the status.  One of those columns is for the position of the track: that is, is it in the perfect order within the mix, or does it need adjustment?  Songs initially start out with a blank in this column, meaning I haven’t yet added them to the physical playlist—they’re just a notional idea at that point.  Once I do add them, the blank is upgraded to an X, which means this track is just sitting at this position because that’s the order I happened to add it in; it doesn’t really belong in this position.  Then I start pondering positioning, but strictly from a mental perspective.  That is, I think about the tempo of the songs, or separating songs from the same artists, or any other reasons I can think of why a song should go here or there, but I’m not listening to the actual tracks yet.  Any tracks moved because of a guess at this point get their X upgraded to a ?.  Now I start listening to the tracks in my guesswork order.  If the position works pretty well, I upgrade the ? to a ~.  If the position is perfect, I change that to a >.  Once every track is marked with a >, the volume is set.

Of course, sometimes a position sounds only okay at first, but the more I listen to it the more natural it sounds.  I call this process “hardening.”¹⁰  Gradually, over time, the list, which started out as soft clay, hardens into a permanent set.  So far, the only mix volumes I’ve shared were “fully hardened,” so to speak.  But many of my mixes and volumes are still open for modification.  Which means that you may come back one day to find that the mix has changed.  In general, this is a good thing: it means I’m always open to new ideas, and I’m not afraid to say I made a mistake and something could be better if we tried it a different way.

This volume is the first which still has a little wiggle room in the chosen tracks: specifically, it’s the last three.  They’re a fairly recent addition, and I’m still not sure they fully work.  The story is that the set was a little short (only 57 minutes), and I felt it needed extending.  I had the Reel Big Fish “Take on Me” that I knew I wanted to add, but just tossing it in at the end didn’t flow well.  I needed more.

I’d also recently acquired the soundtrack to The Mask, which includes some fine tunes, including “Hey Pachuco!” by Royal Crown Revue.  Many retro-swing fans love RCR, but I’m more lukewarm on them.  Still, there’s no denying that “Hey Pachuco!” is a great track and I’d already decided to add it onto a future volume.  (Eventually I decided to use the version from their album Mugzy’s Move, which has a stronger opening than the soundtrack version in my opinion.)  In some fit of experimentation, I determined that “Take on Me” flowed pretty damn well after “Hey Pachuco!” and I considered making this the opening of a new group, possibly for Salsatic Vibrato III.  Certainly “Hey Pachuco!” is a strong enough opener to start a group, if not a whole volume.  But the problem is that “Take on Me” is a pretty good closer, so I didn’t really want to put anything on after it.  So I decided to make them their own little grouplet, and I certainly had room at the end of this volume.

So now all I needed was a transition between “Suits Are Picking Up the Bill” and “Hey Pachuco!”.  While trying to find some info on another retro-swing band I’d heard on Pandora,¹¹ I ran across the webpage of a pretty hardcore retro-swing fan.  A lot of the bands he talks about I’d heard of, of course, but there were new acts as well, so I scrambled to see which ones I liked.  One that I discovered from this page is the moderately obscure Swingerhead.¹²  I picked up a copy of She Could Be a Spy and it’s not bad.  Not great, perhaps, but not bad.  “Swing Out” is, at 2½ minutes, a bit long to be a proper bridge, but it works.  Perhaps eventually it’ll grow on me enough that I’ll call it hardened.  But, for now, it’s still at the ~ stage in the positioning column.

Next time I think we’ll take a more nostalgic turn.

⇐ Salsatic Vibrato I

Salsatic Vibrato III ⇒

__________

1 Still am, I suppose.

2 I wish this style had a name, because we’ll hear from it again when we get to Imelda May and Devil Doll.

3 See, I told you last time that I’d redress that slight.

4 We’ll see a couple of other tracks off it on some other mixes here and there.

5 We’ll see a longer ode to drinking when we get to Salsatic Vibrato IV.

6 Which makes it the second ska remake of an 80’s alternative staple.

7 I cannot in good conscience link you to a full Ricky Martin album.  Your brain might suffer irreparable damage.

8 I’ve also gone back and added the cover images to Salsatic Vibrato I.

9 In fact, Prima’s song from The Jungle Book, “I Wanna Be Like You,” will show up on volume IV, sung by our old friends Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.

10 Don’t ask me why.  That’s just the word that sprang to mind when I was pondering this process.

11 We’ll hear that track when we get to Salsatic Vibrato IV.

12 Remember that “moderately obscure” means the barest of articles at AllMusic and/or Wikipedia.  If there were no articles in either place, I’d call that “really obscure.”