Slurpees and Murder Record Club: She Will Love You and Leave You High and Dry (or, 1987 Just Was Not a Year for Lookin' Good)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of the Slurpees and Murder Record Club! Are you all set for the long weekend? Not yet, you ain't!

Get ready to kick it like it's 1987:

Internet on the Radio: Slurpees and Murder Record Club, a Winnipeg Cat Segment on CJOB, and Winnipeg Internet Pundits (Briefly) Returns This Week

Well, hello there, everyone! My apologies for the unintended two-week absence; it seems like the busyness of summer starts earlier and earlier every year, whether it actually feels like summer yet or not. (It's expected to rain today and right through to the end of the week, because of course it is.) But there's well over an hour's worth of content for you to enjoy in this post, so let's get rolling!

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Someone Please Help Me Figure Out This 1984 Commemorative Pope-Themed Cassette

The title says it all, really, but -- hello and welcome back to the Slurpees and Murder Record Club!

Remember how the last installment of SMRC had at least given us something, anything, to work with in determining its origins? Well, PREPARE YOURSELVES:

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Leise Rieselt Der Schnee

The WIPs Year-End Special I'd previously mentioned didn't quite pan out, owing to some scheduling difficulties, but since it would have overlapped with the public hearing for the controversial Osborne Village Shoppers proposal I sort of doubt anybody noticed anyway. (Pundit-wrangler Tessa Vanderhart was embedded at the event and live-tweeted it on @internetpundits, if you'd wondered what the ambiance there was like.)

I had dragged out, dusted off and digitized a seasonally appropriate local album from the ol' record collection to use for musical interludes, and since the whole Christmas season will be over in three days I figure I should share it with you folks while it still makes sense:







The Winnipeg Mennonite Children's Choir (1973)
[website | history | founder bio | I couldn't find anywhere that sells this album, so you'll just have to make do with this ]

I hope you don't mind a few clicks and pops here and there; I did what I could to clean the audio quality up, but the age of the item and the condition I found it in only allow for so many miracles to be worked. (There's one particularly unsettling warble in "Il Est Ne Le Divin Enfant" that I couldn't shake -- but, hey, maybe you like your Christmas music a little creepy.)

The tri-lingual fourty-voice choir was founded in 1957, this particular album recorded inside the Westminster United Church in 1973. I dig the song selection variety on this record; there are a some songs on here that you really don't hear very often any more, and many of the songs that tend to be overplayed this time of year are freshened up here by a switch into German.

(I'll be honest; I straight-up despise most of the standard Christmas repertoire, and it's not like it ever changes.)

I know I tend to overexplain when I post these, so I'll keep the highlights brief. "Alleluia, Sing FOR Joy" -- that's exactly how it's written on the album label, I don't know why -- is badass in its own curious way for a Christmas piece. "The Virgin Mary Had A Baby Boy" gets a surprisingly funky rendition, although a lot of that stems from the organ's effort. "The Sleigh" is less than a minute long, but dang if I don't enjoy every bit of it; I'd probably like all Christmas music a lot more if it involved this kind of urgency. I never quite know what to make of "Huron Indian Carol", but it's done as well here as it's done anywhere. And I really wish the audio quality were better on "Kling Gloekchen", because the two-part harmony in the first half of the song is really quite nice.

I rather doubt I'll be posting again before Christmas, so, Merry Christmas! And Happy Holidays, and everything else that applies this time of year. Only three more sleeps until Boxing Day, Winnipeg!

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: 50 Years and 800 Pounds

Well, hey, long time no see! August was kind of a bust for this site -- perhaps you had noticed -- but hey, if I was going to accidentally take a month off, it made sense that it would be that one. And it was a very nice month, indeed, but all good things must come to an end; the end of the summer has since ambushed our fair province, its sudden comparative cold chasing us all inside whenever we aren't waving sandbags around and hoping the water won't make off with all our stuff.

Yes, the transition into autumn has begun in earnest, and nothing heralds the arrival of dead leaves and early sunsets quite like the observance of Labour Day. The holiday is of course highlighted by its annual Labour Day Classic, the first of two consecutive football games between the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and their hated Saskatchewan Roughrider rivals, and we here at the Slurpees and Murder Record Club are nothing if not dedicated to the journalistic concept of equal time. So! Today's super-special super-sized Labour Day installment will feature two timeworn vinyl selections -- one representing our beloved-until-hockey-arrives Blue Bombers, and one representing the fearsome (if backwards) scourge of the Roughriders.

We begin with a piece of Blue Bomber history, or rather a half-century chunk of it:

Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Just Go to a Pavilion for a Dream That You Can Share

I wrote this Uptown column, about how awesome hidden talents are (spoiler alert: they're pretty awesome), and I mention it to start this post because I'm dedicated to shameless plugs but also because this is the time of year when you are most likely to find out that people you know around town are secretly really good at things.

That's right: it's Folklorama time! Kicking off with a free Saturday show and then running until the middle of the month, Winnipeg's annual multiculturalism festival -- or, as one of my former professors proclaimed it (and indelibly branded it in my mind), "ethnic zoo" -- will be filling community clubs, curling rinks and high school gymnasiums all across town.

Two weeks of good times! Squabbling amongst your travel group over which pavilion to drive to, buying a wacky imported soda pop because the MLCC never allows any beer more exotic than Corona into the festival, eating whatever the spiciest and/or scariest food is on the menu, and clapping along as strangers do exotic and potentially injurious dances for your entertainment. That, my friends, is an evening well spent, and I look forward to this year's extravaganzas (now with less E. Coli!) with glee.

Are you all ready to get into the Folklorama spirit? You'd better be! Because tonight's installment of the Slurpees and Murder Record Club is a sampling of years past -- way, way past -- with something for everyone and a finale that you won't want to listen to. Er--did I say "listen to"? I meant "miss". A finale you won't want to miss.

I bring you:

Megapost! Slurpees and Murder Record Club: Basti Basti Khak Uri Hai (plus: iRiffs! CDC Radio! Round 2 of the NHL Playoffs Begins Tonight! And More!)

Mine is a blogging style that lends itself not to short rapid-fire posts, but to extended absences and then a terrifying extended deluge of content all at once. It's like the old adage about buses: none for ages and then one finally shows up but it's still not the one you need, it's going to the Airport or something, so you have to wait downtown next to the same panhandler for another twenty minutes and he checks back with you another two or three times just in case you've picked up any more change since the last time he asked. App... apparently that adage is different in other cities?

Tonight's entry into the Slurpees and Murder Record Club is an exotic, mysterious album for you fine folks to puzzle over, but -- as is usually the case -- I've first got some self-aggrandizement and some sports chatter to attend to. So let's get started!

Time-Sensitive Information: Go Score Some Tunes

As I've mentioned previously, I'm a fully accredited and (at least temporarily) gainfully employed capital-L Librarian, and Librarians as a group have this indefatigable compulsion to spread information around. It's like, see this information? Have some of it. Sharing is caring!

(This is one of the many reasons why the profession as a whole gets uppity every time people open up the copyright laws for revision -- but then the Prime Minister killed every bill in the country and took off for a couple months, so I guess everyone gets a bit of a break on that one.)

Of course, it would be kind of pointless to throw information around without expecting anybody to want to catch it. But I'm reasonably certain that at least some of my readers might be interested in this knowledge, so take note:



The Winnipeg Folk Festival Store in the Exchange District is having a sale this week, ending on Saturday. I would have told you about it sooner, but I really only found out about it a day late myself by chancing to walk past it.

When I say 'sale', though, I mean sale. This isn't your lame-ass big box kind of promotion where they generously take five per cent off the regular price because they've already opened the box. Peep these:



Half-off remaining 2009 stock, excluding drink containers? CDs are ninety-nine cents? Used vinyl is ten for a buck? You have to understand, deals like this are essentially my catnip. So I've already purchased twenty CDs and thirty LPs from them, for a total retail price of twenty-three bucks plus tax, and I couldn't have been more pleased with myself. (This is a good time for another caveat, though: don't buy more at once than you can reasonably expect to carry. Especially if you're taking public transit.)

There's some good stuff out there -- and I'll probably be featuring a few of my newfound items on this blog at various intervals, as part of my Homecoming 2010 shenanigans -- so have a look-see, especially if you happen to already be passing through the area. Ten records for a dollar, son, come on. This isn't rocket science.

For the Record: Someday We'll Be Together

Hey, guys! Guess what I just remembered I can do!



Earl Van Dyke - Someday We'll Be Together (Johnny & Jackey) (The Earl of Funk, 1970)
[info | ask your local record store for it, they can probably get it easily]

As you could infer from the above, I was moving stuff around in my room today; the record player and the computer are once again close enough to each other that I can connect them, so I once again get to play with my toys in a somewhat productive manner. Well, okay, 'productive' is a strange way of putting it, because it isn't actually an important or necessary task -- but transferring vinyl to MP3 just feels strangely fulfilling, you know? All I need to do now is hook up a cassette player and an 8-track deck to this box and I'll be capable of digitizing almost any audio recording ever. Humour me and my megalomaniacal hobbies!

Time-Sensitive Information

Man a-live, I keep getting distracted from my initial goal of recapping previous festivals and events. And it doesn't help my cause that I'm now being scheduled overtime hours at a job I would have sworn I was supposed to leave three weeks ago.

But what I have here is time-sensitive information, as the helpful post title may have suggested, and time-sensitive information requires immediate action.



You understand, of course. This is important.

See, fourty dollars in a mall CD store will get you two CDs that you can find anywhere, or maybe three CDs tops if you buy some of the terrible newer albums that are specifically priced lower to inflate their sales figures. And as you might expect from my intense and insatiable music geekery that example, I don't shop in mall CD stores very often. Instead I made a beeline for Into the Music today after work, and fourty dollars at Into the Music bought me two used local artist CDs, one new LP, three used LPs, two 45s and a much coveted cassette. Life is good.

Now, this isn't even close to being my biggest Into the Music-related sale haul; I made it down to their old Osborne Village location in its closing days, and I swear to you I went home with over fifty CDs that day. (Some of them were ultimately priced as low as seventy cents, all of them in perfectly listenable condition -- blah blah dick I like music anyway story for another time.) But come on -- I can't simply pass up oldschool vinyl fun at three-quarters the regular price, and I don't think you should pass it up either.

Twenty years of Into the Music! Twenty... years of... man, I was three when Into the Music first opened. That's weird to think about.

The only music my parents actually got for me when I was three was classical music; back in the day (and to this day, now that I think about it), parents genuinely thought that classical music made children smarter. And I still grew up to be pretty dumb about most things, but I can spell 'Tchaikovsky' right on the first try -- so I guess it wasn't a total wash.

Woo, tangent. Huzzah for the power of music! Go buy some!

For the Record: Les Zombis et Les Loups-Garous

OKAY GUYS CHANGE OF PLANS.

I know I concluded my last post by tipping my hand, a little; I said I intended my next entry to be about either Spirited Energy or Rod Bruinooge.

And those were my intentions! Even the best intentions, however, are subject to shifting when something suitably significant surfaces as a subject.

(I am given to brief bouts of alliteration. Humour me.)

Remember, my plan was to see which of the two choices would be the first to trigger my hilariously impotent and indignant rage. (I suspect this is likely how Tom Brodbeck does his writing, too -- except for the part where I've admitted to actually experiencing happiness about anything ever.) But neither one had emerged as a clear frontrunner, yet, and then they were both sidelined yesterday during a trip to Into the Music.

As I mentioned last post, I got a record player last Christmas; I had a surprisingly large pile or records even before then, in a series of plot contrivances that I can always tell you about later. And (as I also mentioned last post) now that I can combine my record player and my computer to form a neat new toy, well, a neat new toy needs neat new accessories.

Celebratory record shopping! Off I went after work to Into the Music, where I happily puttered around before buying a few cheap items. And, as you may or may not already know, a purchase of $5 or more at Into the Music grants you the opportunity to take a free item of your choice from the box of unwanted stuff sitting in front of the counter. (Assuming there's anything in there that you would want, of course -- hence my referring to it as a box of unwanted stuff.)

Fortune smiled upon me that fine day, for in that box I found something that has made me a very happy man. (If Tom Brodbeck ever writes 'I am a very happy man' in the Winnipeg Sun, I will buy all of my readers a delicious Slurpee.) Indeed, as my free item, in that box I found:



Be honest. This is what you would have taken, too, if you were there at the time.

This 1979 album, Raffi's third LP, features a variety of similarly minded small-time Canadian artists and was produced by a young Daniel Lanois (!). And it predates his breakout Baby Beluga album by a year, meaning this is the Raffi stuff that nobody knows about. Hell, I sure didn't. And it's too bad that I didn't, too!

See, in recent years, Raffi has transmogrified himself into a successful global-political activist and philosopher. He's released a worldbeat album; he's worked alongside at least half a dozen non-governmental organizations; he's called out Rogers Wireless for their shameless marketing towards children; he's written the theme song for David Suzuki's current tour, with David Suzuki as a background singer; he's performed for Nelson Mandela; he's established a new philosophy based on improving living conditions for children worldwide; he's even compiled and edited a book about said philosophy that includes contributions by Barbara Kingsolver, Lloyd Axworthy, and the Dalai Lama. He refers to himself as a global troubador, and -- unless Bono or someone seriously steps their game up -- he might be the only man on the planet who can justifiably get away with calling himself that.

(To quote Tom Lehrer: "It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished.")

But this is way before all of that. When tasked with thinking of early Raffi, people think of Baby Beluga; when tasked with thinking of pre-Baby Beluga Raffi, they picture a seemingly infinite expanse of pure white where nothing ever existed.

So it's Raffi, you might say. It's Raffi before people liked Raffi. Big deal. What, you might ask of me, is your excitement here?

Well, now! This is also a song in French, and my love for songs in languages I don't necessarily understand has been previously documented.

Hearing that, you might well still ask, so what? Of course he recorded some stuff in French; he was, after all, operating in the Canadian music scene. English or French, it's still Raffi, in this case Raffi in his indieearly years.

And that is true. But.



This is not just Raffi. And this is not just Raffi singing in French.

This is Raffi, singing in French, about zombies.

Raffi - Les Zombis et Les Loups-Garous [buy (on CD) | official site]

Zombies! God damn! This is awesome!

I am not lying to you when I swear that this song, from the moment I popped it on my stereo, has remained at the forefront of my brain right through to the time I am spending right now typing these words. It certainly made the hours fly by at work, I can tell you that. (A particularly cute office girl now thinks that I'm a lunatic -- but I am a lunatic, so I suppose it all evens out.)

The liner notes credit the writer of the song as being 'Bill Russell', possibly the same Bill Russell who was one of the foremost authorities on early New Orleans jazz. I can easily imagine this song having originally been a Louisiana tune, what with the mythology all its own that the area cultivated for centuries. Zombies? Werewolves? French lyrics? From New Orleans? Yeah, I can buy that.

These are the times when, briefly, I regret not becoming an academic; there are some subjects, like these, that I feel like I could happily study and chase for my entire life without ever getting bored or losing my passion for them. This feeling passes quickly, of course, because I then remember that no institution would ever voluntarily support me on these sorts of ideas; the kinds of topics I find interesting enough to publish about would be considered kooky even by modern university standards. C'est la vie.

And to think -- even with the seemingly inescapable prominence of Raffi amongst children's musicians, this song never once grazed my childhood. I had never heard this song before yesterday, I had never even heard of this song before yesterday, and if you had tried to tell me about it before yesterday I would have sworn you were making the whole thing up just to be mean to me. How did I finally find it? Entirely by luck and by chance, buying a completely unrelated album at Into the Music and just picking the right day to look in the box of unwanted stuff. My luck is not nearly that good, normally; such is the power of Raffi.

Raffi is love. And one day Raffi is going to save us all. Just you watch.

For the Record: Walk Through the Fire

As late, I have picked up a couple of things that will liven this blog up a bit.

(Oh, yeah, but first another correction: last time I went to my mother's house my sister got all uppity about my misspelling John Mayer's name, so OKAY FINE THE SPELLING IS 'MAYER' WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME)

The first item of interest is an old copier-scanner-printer; the printer part hasn't worked for months (if not years) now, and for as long as anybody can remember my little brother has been using it as a dirty-plate holder and a Slurpee tray.

That's okay! I'm not too interested in the printer part, and whether the copier works or not I can't imagine what I would be making copies of. (Actually, I can -- but that'll be a summer scheme, not a winter one.) It's all about the scanner, for me, and the scanner looks like it'll work okay.

The other item I'd mentioned is one that made perfect sense the longer I thought about it; I have a record player (which I got as a gift last Christmas), and I have a computer (which I got six years ago, but let's not start that again), and so obviously anything that would connect the two is a good idea.

So! A scanner for scanning images (which I desperately needed; up until now I've been laying things flat and then taking pictures of them with a two-megapixel digital camera, which is a horrible way to go about it), and a cable between my computer and record player for playing records through my computer (which I'm sure everybody else I know is years ahead of me on, but let me have my fun here).

I'm stoked about this, you guys!

The scanner means, for example, that I can do this --



-- and the cord means, for example, that I can do this.

Peter Gabriel - Walk Through the Fire (Promotional 12'' Remix Version) [official site]

Whee!

Anybody with even the smallest collection of records (and believe me, mine is tiny compared to my CD collection) has at least one or two possessions they want to make noise about. A rare pressing of a favourite album that later went to cassette or CD, or an obscure notable that you just don't see any more (if you ever saw it in the first place), or something that someone grew up listening to and loving regardless of quality, or what have you.

Some records are so good, it's amazing they never made it to CD; some records are so bad, it's a wonder they ever made it to vinyl; some records are so weird, it's a wonder anybody even had the idea in the first place. It was a simpler time, then. probably because stealing everything was so much harder, I mean holy damn these things are huge

This selection above is an example of something I never expected to actually physically see in my lifetime. Peter Gabriel is by far my favourite artist (which explains much about me and yet explains nothing about my musical tastes), and damned if I wasn't looking for rarities and previously unheard material right from the minute I learned there was -- of all things! -- music on the internet.

As far as I knew, for almost a decade, Walk Through the Fire existed entirely as a quiet and scratchy unreleased track. Those were the days -- everything was encoded at 32kbps tops, nothing ever hit two megabytes in size, and people considered themselves lucky to ever find a complete song out there in the (world wide web of) wilderness amongst the shitty thirty-second samples and Tripod 404 notices.

We were kids and we were stupid, of course. That hardly needs to be said. God, we were basically internet cavemen.

So anyway, a couple of months ago I ran into the actual physical record in Into the Music, marked out like an idiot, and bought it for four dollars. The song as I'd known it for years was originally released as a 1984 promotional single, with a less interesting version of the song later appearing on the Against All Odds soundtrack. Go figure that the mix I heard way back then was the one specifically harder to find, and that I would go on to find it entirely by chance. Go figure!

You know, this isn't really such a good story after all, is it? Kind of a letdown after all of that.

Still, though! This is one of my favourite songs ever, and nothing makes me happier than knowing I hold it as a material possession. Records are awesome! Go records!

So, yeah, that's what's new with me. Fun with technology! Good times. The next post will either be me razzing Spirited Energy or me razzing Rod Bruinooge, depending on which one raises more comically overzealous outrage from me at the time. Until then!