Posts Tagged ‘Jimmy Buffett’

Bootleg City: Top 17 Songs of the ’90s

For this special edition of Bootleg City, I’m spotlighting the top 17 songs of the ’90s, a decade we can all officially start nostalgicizing on January 1, 2010. Until then we’re in limbo, if you’ll pardon the expression — the untimely deaths of Michael Jackson and John Hughes in the past six weeks have put a damper on the last blast of ’80s nostalgia in this decade. But life goes on, of course, as does pop culture’s never-ending look backward.

From top to bottom, here are the top 17 songs:

1. But Anyway (Blues Traveler)
2. Put a Lid on It (Squirrel Nut Zippers)
3. 6th Avenue Heartache (The Wallflowers)
4. It’s a Shame About Ray (Lemonheads)
5. Strong Enough (Sheryl Crow)
6. Hey Dude (Kula Shaker)
7. The Freshmen (The Verve Pipe)
8. The Good Life (Weezer)
9. Where You Get Love (Matthew Sweet)
10. Mom’s a Surfer (a.k.a. My Mom Can Surf) (G. Love & Special Sauce)
11. St. Teresa (Joan Osborne)
12. Low (Cracker)
13. Landslide (Tori Amos)
14. Desperately Wanting (Better Than Ezra)
15. Who Will Save Your Soul (Jewel)
16. Super Bon Bon (Soul Coughing)
17. Galileo (Indigo Girls)

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Freshly Unwrapped: 2/20/09

Do not be alarmed! Do not adjust your set! Chartburn hasn’t gone away — it’s just sharing space with some more Friday features, including the new and improved Freshly Unwrapped, in which your intrepid Chartburn panel discusses some of next week’s biggest releases today. And away we go!

David Medsker: Yuck. The singer can’t sing, and the band has no identity.

Beau Dure: After the first song, I was prepared to write a defense of R.E.M.-style jangle rock by another Georgia band. After the second song, I decided it wasn’t worth it. They veered into Nick Cave “We hate the audience — please follow us around blindly and buy shit” territory.

Dw. Dunphy: The initial word on this album seemed to be centralized on the vocals, as in, “Ugh, the vocals…” But I’m a tolerant guy and can take all sorts of musical eccentricity. Plus, the indie sites are falling all over themselves to praise Black Lips. They can’t all be wrong, can they? Hmm, maybe they can. Or maybe I’m just getting too old. I distinctly remember the stuff I listened to in high school and how all the adults branded ‘em “atonal hollering.” Now that I’ve fully confessed that I find these songs nothing more than atonal hollering, I can start boiling all my meals into easily digested soups, rewash and reuse my Baggies and go to bed at 7:00pm every night.

Black Lips, curse you. You’ve made me my grandfather.

Ted Asregadoo: Man, these songs are horrible. Under “Influences” on their MySpace page, I wonder why they didn’t list “Drunk guy singing unintelligible songs while laying in the gutter outside a dive bar”?

Jeff Giles: So this is what “flower punk” sounds like. It’s funny — without looking at a list of their influences, I’m pretty sure I’d dig whatever’s on any of the band members’ iPods, but the Black Lips themselves are close to unbearable. It’s got a slight “Velvets on meth” vibe to it, which means nine out of ten music bloggers will be typing up their reviews one-handed. “Starting Over” could be a great song if a talented band recorded it. (more…)

Unsolicited Career Advice for… Jimmy Buffett

Here’s another missive from the Skwatzenschitz archives, which I explained a bit last time. I’m not sure how Jimmy Buffett reacted to Uncle Donnie’s advice, but, to the best of my knowledge, he hasn’t taken action on any of it. —RS

TO: Jimmy Buffett
FROM: Don Skwatzenschitz
RE: Career advice

jbuffetttwpa1Jim, babe, hope your winter is going well, and that you’re staying out of the cold and getting plenty of light, even on these overcast days. We’ve had a bunch of them lately. Mitzi gets that seasonal affective disorder, goes all lethargic and depressed on me. She has a special lamp she sits in front of for a couple hours every day, and we have to keep the house temps at 78 degrees, or she won’t get out of bed. Hope you’re dealing with winter a little better than Mitzi.

Anyway, Jim, the music business sucks. I don’t need to tell you that. Downloading rules, but it simultaneously sucks, because the artists can’t make any money off it. Not that they made any money off their records anyway, but you get the point. It all sucks.

You, however, have a career as a live performer to fall back on, and that’s great, man. Just great. But you’re blowing it. You’re really blowing it, like the record companies are blowing it. You’ll be out on the street in a year, you’re blowing it so big. I don’t want you to start sucking too, Jimbo, like the whole music industry. So I’m going to give you some advice: (more…)

Bottom Feeders: The Ass End of the ’80s — 2008 Recap

Today marks the final post of 2008 for Bottom Feeders. So instead of starting the letter G and then going on break, let’s take a look back at the first 33 weeks of the series, with what I believe are the ten best, the ten worst, and the ten rarest songs in the series up to this point.

The Best
10. Jimmy Buffett, “It’s My Job” (download)
9. Bee Gees, “You Win Again” (download)
8. Crosby, Stills & Nash, “War Games” (download)
7. The Time, “The Oak Tree” (download)
6. The Cult, “Fire Woman” (download)
5. Dragon, “Rain” (download)
4. Devo, “Theme From Doctor Detroit(download)
3. Jon Astley, “Jane’s Getting Serious” (download)
2. Joan Armatrading, “Drop the Pilot” (download)
1. The Cure, “Lullaby” (download)

I’ve listened to every song I own in my collection — every track to hit the Hot 100, thousands of tracks on the R&B and dance charts, and album after album, but listening to all of these songs pretty thoroughly while writing them up for Bottom Feeders has opened my ears to some tunes I didn’t realize were so good. Two of those are “You Win Again” by the Bee Gees, which I couldn’t stop listening to weeks after I posted it, and “War Games” by Crosby, Stills & Nash, which I listened to repeatedly only after reading your comments on it.

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Bottom Feeders: The Ass End of the ’80s, Part 12

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I love collecting music, that’s a given. As with most collectors of something, it’s the thrill of the find that really does it for me. Two weeks ago I was at a place called Positively Records in Levittown, Pennsylvania, which is a store I visited weekly while I was in high-school living with Mom and Dad. Of course, Positively CDs would have been a better name, as no records were ever present. This was my first visit in at least two years and I walk in and run right over to the cheap used CDs as I always did and after about 15 minutes I happened to turn to the left and blam! — there they were. Records! Tons of them. $2 each and on the floor of course. So now I’m excited and sitting on the floor flipping through vinyl when I see a sign that says “$1 records in the middle aisle.” So now of course I have to run over there, because if there’s ever a place where you are going to find shitty records from the ’80s, it’s in the dollar bins. So I’m sitting in the middle of an aisle big enough for only one person to begin with, looking under the CD racks where all the records are. Every time I move a record, I get dust flying and I’m slowly but surely losing feeling in my right leg. But I can’t get over how exciting it to find cheap records in the store. I end up leaving with about 25 records no more than $2 each and of course I look like a gimp doing it since I have to walk around the store unable to feel my leg from the knee down from sitting on it for an hour. But that’s part of the fun. No matter where the records are located and how dirty and dingy it is on a floor or back room, I’m there. The only thing that would stop me is if they were covered in feces or something equally as gross.

However, it’s inevitable that with every purchase of records now that at least half of them are going to sound like the feces I just mentioned above. Case in point, the album I’m listening to right now as I type this — Frehley’s Comet by Ace Frehley. I listen to everything I buy, but I don’t buy them because they are good or bad. Now and then I find a gem, but for some reason it’s just as satisfying for me to find the train wreck too. I’m not saying Frehley’s Comet is a train wreck per se, but it’s certainly a big old brick of shit. The difference between the two is very subtle but there’s still a difference. My buddy Andy repeatedly tells me that I’m the only person he knows that discovers new music — 25 years after it was released. I’m constantly telling him about some ’80s record that I heard for the first time that he has to listen to and he has no interest in discovering what he missed back then. And I completely understand this. It’s tough to listen to a Peter Godwin record for the first time and not think it sounds completely dated. At this point in my collection, I really just try to listen to the music for what it is. Sure, these things sound old most of the time, but I’ve listened to so much ’80s music that at least for me it fits right in. And at this point if I don’t own the record already then I’m 100% sure that I haven’t heard it before. So everything from this point out in the collection is technically “new” for me.

This week we have a short post as we trek on with our alphabetical look at the bottom of Billboard Hot 100 charts in the ’80s and close out the letter “B.”

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