A baker's dozen of great songs
Arbitrary order and extremely haphazard selection.
If you've heard all these, you probably need help
and yes, the background image is one of the great album covers of all time...
1. Cock Sparrer -- Take 'em all. Oi/Punk with humor. [How did I wind up as an
"American with dark glasses," given where I was born, and where I was educated?]
2. Draytons Two. Drink milk. Spouge all the way --- music from Barbados
3. Growlin' Tiger. When I dead, bury me clothes. Calypso king
from the country where I happened to be born.
4. Junior Kimbrough. You better run. Inspiration for the Black Keys.
If I could see three musicians live....
Erik Satie, Junior Kimbrough, and let me think....
Captain Beefheart might have listened to this for his first (bluesy) album "Safe as Milk"
5. Lords of the New Church. Dance with me. Maybe you had to be there...
If you saw them in Tucson ca. 1985, you heard Stiv Bator snarl the classic line "As you are, I was. As I am, you will be."
What a jerk, but what a song.
6. Shannon Wright. black little stray. Or Crowsdell's "Sad eyes"
7. Shantel. Disko Partizani. Perfect storm, surfeit form. Some nitwit attacks him for singing in English.
If you're Czech and your dance partner is Danish, vous devez falar Ingles porque, si no, no se puede entender, verdad?
Ocean horrorshow, droog.
8. Sixteen Horsepower. Brimstone Rock. Gimme dat low time religion
9. Stiff Little Fingers. Roots, radicals, rockers, reggae. You lose
10. The Templars. Land of the Free. I pledge allegiance to a spirit larger than jingoism
11. The Tiger Lillies. Roll up. Tom Waits "Jockey Full of Bourbon" cross-raised in Slough
12. Queenadreena. Medicine Jar. You were fine up to this point ...
13. Los Mirlos. Muchachita del Oriente. Gunslingers surf the Amazon; Peru's answer to Aguirre
(Para Elisa almost made it instead -- Beethoven goes Chicha in deepest Peru). Check out "The Roots of Chicha."
Okay, it's Rancid's "And Out Came the Wolves"