Yes, it’s official: You want a guarantee of at least some takes from me every day, you subscribe on Twitter. A daily blog post plus all the other stuff I do, plus the worthy desire to not do stuff, means that I am not going to write every day. Sometimes a project will come to me, sometimes I’ll have pure time off and feel like journaling, but it’s too late to make this anything but occasional.
What can it offer? The problem that stopped me before is that while I like talking about my entertainment tastes and lifestyle, both felt interesting during vacation, and both, with that haze gone, feel pretty pedestrian. This is too harsh, right? If I turned this site into a recommendation of one song a day, one I was fairly sure most of my friends hadn’t heard, I could pull that off until - wild guess time - June 5, 2042.
Let’s try it intermittently. The song I kept returning to today, when my physical activity included 1) a walk back and forth from the grocery store and 2) sitting, was “I Walk” by Don Cherry. I had never heard of this song before I heard it. I’d never heard the album it’s on - “Home Boy, Sister Out” - until I finished listening to Cherry’s 1970s catalogue and decided to try the one with the photo of him looking stylishly surprised.
Head into a store and this’d be filed under JAZZ, in the back, but it’s not really a jazz album. “Butterfly Friend” sounds like a Randy Newman song being written as it’s sung, “Treat Your Lady Right” sounds like the song from an instructional video, “Reggae to the High Tower is,” well, no points for guessing the genre it sounds like.
Most of this makes up the least interesting Cherry album I’d heard, diverse but not transporting. But I stuck with “I Walk.” This record was recorded in 1985, after “Duck Rock” (a cult hit that introduced music critics to Soweto beat) but before “Graceland” (a hit that introduced your dad to Soweto beat). So the opening lick, from a bubbly kind of jazz guitar, sounds dated but clearly was experimental at the time.
“Right foot starts,” Cherry shouts, just off the beat. “Left foot follows. That’s it!”
This commences one of those “daily existence” songs that nobody really writes anymore, and Brian Wilson wrote best. He could describe the act of watching “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” and stretch it to three minutes. Cherry’s lyric starts out as banal as Wilson’s, with a comical reaction to a jogger (“just joggin’”) then a wish for roller skates.
Halfway through, Cherry reveals the meaning of this. The narrator is unhappy that his “check didn’t arrive,” then mutters that he has to “get to this program.” The popular interpretation is that the narrator is in some kind of recovery program, admitting at the end of the song that he doesn’t “exist in a definite way” or know where he’s going.
It was the only song on the record that I listened to again, and then I learned that Cherry didn’t write it. Ramuntcho Matta, the guitarist, wrote everything, and the bass that keeps yanking you back in is from Jannick Top, a key member of the French prog group Magma. How didn’t I find this when I was writing my book? Cherry was omnivorous, but I didn’t realize he’d made that crossover. It’s a fun song, not a significant one, and that’s the kind that I’ll highlight sometimes.
You and Jeff Stein (together) need your own Podcast on Spotify (time permitting). Entertainment tastes and lifestyle are suitable topics. The people like and trust you both.
That was a fun listen. "Bonyorno", but a proper "bonjour"