El Burro Volador

So this week’s pick in the great music experiment  took me to the fourth country in as many weeks.  Apparently, there is a genre of West African music known as juju, built around the talking drum.  A guitarist and bandleader named I.K. Dairo helped popularize this music in the late 1950′s and early 1960′s.  Mr. Moon’s pick this week is a disc called “Definitive Dairo” an album of unusually radio-friendly numbers by juju standards, because A) they all clock in under 8 minutes, a rarity in the genre, and B) they supposedly contain a ridiculous number of melodic hooks.

I’ll be honest.  Not only do I not hear many different hooks, after a handful of listens I have difficulty telling many of the songs apart.  They are all based around those distinctive African polyrhythms and choral vocals, with Dairo sprinkling some accompanying phrases from his guitar into the mix.  It is good stuff, to be sure, but I have no trouble believing Dairo’s claim that all these tracks were laid down in one day.  Perhaps I lack a true musician’s ear, and am just not picking up on the subtle differences.

Anyhow, I find it very upbeat music, as those drums are always beating out a danceable rhythm and those voices are always in harmony.  It probably helps that I don’t understand a word of Yoruba.  For all I know, they could be singing about any of the myriad perils I associate with Africa, but all I would hear is togetherness and revelry.

Altogether, this is a pretty accessible introduction to juju music for the curious, and it may well be a treat for serious music types who can appreciate the craft on display here.  Heck, it even works for those merely looking for pleasant background music.  I am officially calling the great music experiment four-for-four.

(As a side note, this was the first album on the list that I could not find on iTunes.  I was able to get a lightly-used copy via Amazon and pay about the going rate for cds.)

Last week’s selection in the grand music experiment was Cafe Tacuba’s album Cuatro Caminos.  Virtually the first thing one notices about the band’s sound is the voice of lead singer Ruben Albarran.  It is raspy, but also high and a bit nasal, and reminds me of nothing so much as the growl of a small dog.

This is good for some amusement, but it wouldn’t come to much more if the band’s ability to craft quality pop hooks wasn’t apparent from the very first song on the album, the eminently catchy “Cero y Uno”.  The style of the band turns out to be eclectic and fairly sophisticated, too, effortlessly blending such staples of traditional and contemporary Mexican music as the guitar and accordion with electronic sounds on songs like the bouncy up-tempo “Eo”, replete with video game style beeps and boops.

The band shifts easily between tempos and moods as well, following the languid “Mediodia”, with “Que Pasara” – a showcase for percussion and guitar distortion that wouldn’t sound out of place coming out of the garage next door where those punk kids are practicing while you try to get some sleep.  A couple tracks later comes the album’s big hit, “Eres” as cool and polished a pop love song as you could ask for.

I could go on, but that would just be belaboring the point – these guys do a little bit of everything, and they do most of it quite well.

I’m glad that I was introduced to these fellows.  The music experiment is paying off.  I’ve just cracked open the next pick, so maybe I’ll write about it in a day or two, once I’ve had a chance to immerse in it.

Sorry if this has turned into the music blog, it is one of the few things I can get excited enough to write about at present.  I promise to broaden my scope as conditions improve.

I am getting over missing Cleo a little bit.  Enough to get on with life, though I think about her every day.  I actually would be comfortable never getting past this stage, thinking about sweet little Weezy every day.  So, I am going to put up a shrine to her as one of those little pages at the top of the screen.  I’ll work on it a little every day until it feels finished.

Anyhow, I thought I’d mostly write about something else today, just because it has been so long since I have written about something else.  I figured that last week’s music experiment would be as good a topic as any.

As some of you may remember, a few weeks back I decided to listen to one of the albums from 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die each week.  Week One was ABBA’s Gold, and week two is what I’m ambling toward telling you about.

I decided to check out the first artist under “B”, in keeping with my alphabetic selection criteria.  This netted me a very interesting album named The Baby Huey Story.

So, what is the Baby Huey story?  Apparently, Huey was a local legend on the Chicago club scene in the late sixties/early seventies, one of those guys who looms large in town and is virtually unheard-of outside the city limits.  Of course, the four-hundred pound Baby Huey would have loomed large anywhere, in a literal sense.

Anyhow, by 1970 Huey’s backing band, The Babysitters, had gotten tight enough that someone finally decided to record the whole package.  Huey was set to become a national star.  While they were finishing up the album, though, the twenty-six-year-old star dropped dead in his hotel room.  They rounded out the five tracks Baby had laid down with a few instrumentals from his band and came out with the album, but it didn’t go anywhere commercially, sinking down into cult classic status until it resurfaced in the 1980′s when every hip hop artist and their dog sampled it.

Anyway, that’s the story, and I admit it was a lot more what I was looking for cachet-wise than a greatest hits compilation from one of the biggest selling pop acts of all time – but how does it sound?

Frickin’ awesome.  Huey’s stuff anyway.  The album leads off with the funky “Listen to Me”, then glides through a throwaway instrumental before hitting the heart of the album, an epic cover of Sam Cooke’s classic “A Change is Going to Come”.  Unlike Cooke’s original, which derived a simple dignity from his burnished voice, this version is earthy, gritty.  It showcases all of Huey’s vocal gifts, including the occasional unearthly shriek or wail, and even a soliloquy to the crowd.

Huey follows this contemplative masterpiece with the feel good “Mighty Mighty” and the absolutely classic “Hard Times”.  Sandwiched between two more skippable instrumentals is “Running”, the last Huey number on the album and a prime piece of sixties psychedelic soul.

This overlooked R&B classic definitely bettered Week One’s pick.  Of course, I am so slow in writing about it that I have been listening to the third pick already, maybe I’ll write about that someday soon.

As some of you know, one of the many loathsome characteristics of feline leukemia virus is that it is pretty damn contagious.  Since the disease took Cleo, Gypsy is getting tested today at 3:00, so I’ll make you a deal.  If you agree to send any spare positive energy you have this way, by whatever metaphysical mechanism you prefer to employ (prayer, sacrifice, forwarding chain emails, etc.)  I’ll come back here after the test and let you know how it turned out.  Clap if you believe in fairies.

Update: Gypsy’s test came back negative, which means he probably doesn’t have the virus.  There is a small chance that he does have it and is giving a false negative, so they would like to test him again in 90 days.  But he probably doesn’t have it.  Thanks for sending good juju his way.

If I was a bit flippant about Cleo’s thyroid problem, it was because I was relieved.  The diagnosis was that her problem was treatable, and that, with the addition of daily medication, she would go back to being her good old weaselly self.

But that was on Wednesday.  Although we gave Cleo her first dose of medicine on Thursday, it became apparent by Friday morning that she was, as Rebekah put it, fading.   So we took her back into the vet for more tests.  I held her on my lap the whole time I was there, even though, as usual, Beezy shed like all get out, leaving a layer of cat hair on my shirt and short so dense that it actually obscured the color of the underlying garment in places.  I didn’t care.

The doctor who saw Cleo this time was alarmed by her worsening symptoms, and concluded that something more than the thyroid was involved.  The word “lesion” was used in reference to Cleo’s brain.  I agreed to leave her for further testing and go to work.

At about eleven-thirty the doctor and I had that difficult phone conversation where you explain that yes, you love kitty, but thousands of dollars for an MRI or CT scan (in my experience, vets never call it a “cat scan”) is not in the budget, so please confine your efforts to some blood-testing and cover our bases with medical treatment.

At about noon, the doctor and Rebekah had the much more difficult conversation, the one where the doctor says the test for feline leukemia came back positive, and there’s no treating or controlling the disease at this stage.  Rebekah asked the doctor if we could have Cleo for one more night before bringing her back fo her last visit.  They said yes.

We planned to make Weasel’s last night a good one.  On the way to pick her up from the vet, I stopped and bought some cream for her – we had tuna at the house, but solids were always less interesting to Cleo.  We thought she could read in bed with ‘Bekah, who wouldn’t mind when Cleo batted at her book or laid down on it.  We figured she could be let out into the garden for a last roll in the dirt and bask in the sun.

She probably couldn’t sleep on bed, for fear she might fall off in the night (her balance was going, and she walked in circles – she had very nearly fallen off of several things in the last couple days), but we were planning on putting her to bed in a pile of fresh-from-the-dryer laundry, another one of her favorite things.

As it happened the highlight of Weezy’s last day was the afternoon she spent tucked beneath Rebekah’s chin as they read together on the bed.  Her forepaws weren’t working well enough to bat at the pages as she used to, but she seemed happy, ‘Bekah said.  I had gone back to work for a few hours so that the two could have some alone time and so that the bills from Beezy dying didn’t wipe us out as well.

By the time I came home at four o’clock, Cleo was sinking much faster than we’d anticipated.  I held her for a while.  I poured her a saucer of cream, and though she was clearly interested, sticking her head over it several times, she didn’t seem to be able to extend her tongue to lap the bowl.  Eventually I took her outside for a bit, and this seemed to perk her up.  She got up to explore the garden, but could only circle around the same couple feet of ground, no rolling or basking was in store.  I took her back into the bedroom and tried to read with her, but found that I couldn’t concentrate on anything but Beezy.  I got a piece of paper and began writing down all the things I loved about Cleo.  Then I read it aloud to her and petted her for a while.  Rebekah came in and we had a talk.  It was becoming increasingly apparent that the spark of life in Cleo was withdrawing from her body – she couldn’t get to her feet on her own, her breathing was becoming labored, her left eye was drooping, and neither of her eyes followed an extended finger passed in front of her face.  We decided that waiting until our appointment late next morning, more than twelve hours away, was selfish – Cleo could do nothing but suffer, and we were just putting off saying goodbye.

So we called the Emergency Vet Hospital.  We bundled Weezy up in Bruce, Rebekah’s longtime security blanket, and took her for one more car ride.  At the hospital they put us in a room right away, had us fill out paperwork and settle the bill beforehand – which was considerate, as we wouldn’t want to bother with it after.  I held Weezy while Rebekah did the  pen work.  They took Cleo in the back to put a catheter in, and through the closed door we heard her make her tiny plaintive cry, the one that all her life long had never failed to inspire pity in me.  I told ‘Bekah I should go back and just be there to comfort her while they did, but she told me to let them do their jobs.

Once Beezy came back to us, wearing a bracelet made of a green ace bandage with a catheter poking out, she soon settled on my lap.  Curled into a tiny ball, she looked cozy and comfortable.  I cupped her tiny head in my palm and stroked her ear with my thumb, while my other hand found a place by her hip to scritch, also with just one thumb, burrowing into her soft, dense fur.  She began to purr quietly for the first time all evening, and closed her eyes.  “Motorboat, motorboat” I said, as I often had before when Beezy began to purr in my lap.  For a moment it was as though nothing was wrong; we were just waiting for the doctor to come in and wrap up a routine physical.

Then the doctor came in, and ever-so-delicately, ever-so-gently, steered us through the final act of Weezy’s life.  I gave up my petting of Beezy’s head to Rebekah, and Cleo kept purring quietly throughout the injection until, sometime just after eight o’clock, she died.

Our tiny fluffball Cleo mysteriously began circling to the left the other night, and to skip over the intervening stages of our reaction (amused, unsettled, concerned, frightened, etc.) we took her to the vet.  It turns out that she had a suffered a little kitty stroke.  Her thyroid is the culprit, and to skip over the biological nitty-gritty of the why, it seems she will probably be okayish if she takes some thyroid medicine for the remainder of her days.  No word yet on whether or not she will continue listing to port.

So, I’m not sure if I mentioned it, but a while back Rebekah changed her hairstyle.  She went with a much shorter look, and it gave her a certain amount of hipness with which to resume her college career.  One of the unforeseen consequences, and biggest benefits, of the new style has been its tendency to interact strangely with ‘Bekah’s pillow.  It somehow absorbs every toss and turn Rebek executes in the course of her nightly slumber, and when she wakes in the morning her hair is a seismic event, all spikes and crests.  Today she was sporting a particularly magnificent fin, for cryin’ out loud.  I’ve though of surreptitiously photographing some of the more spectacular outcroppings, purely for scientific purposes, but I am so bad with a camera that I would probably just end up taking extreme closeups of my own eye…

Hi all, sorry to have totally bailed on you for the last week.  My habits/schedule have changed, so the morning time I was using for blogging has kind of disappeared.  I am trying to adjust by blogging at other times and just posting it in the mornings, and we’ll see if I can make it work.  Anyhow, let’s not use up anymore time on that.

I recently started my new music experiment.  I mentioned it a while back – each week I’ll be trying out a new recording from 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die.  Last week I decided to simply turn to the first entry in the book (it is organized alphabetically) and try that.

The selection was ABBA’s Gold.  Now, considering the fact that I am something of a music snob, and that one of the primary reasons I purchased the book was to uncover obscure artists and new genres to explore, a “greatest hits” album from the world’s second biggest-selling pop band did not inspire confidence.

I was somewhat disarmed by the author’s admission that ABBA’s work can appear to be “air-brushed nothingness” – if nothing else, I am a sucker for a well-turned phrase.  As I read further, he discussed the craft and discipline evident in producing so much perfect pop – the one unforgivable sin in pop seems to be rambling or deviating from catchy hook-and-refrain style writing.  As he discussed how ABBA “polished everything to a blinding sheen”, I began to think that perhaps I was too harsh to a genre which requires such restraint on the part of its writers.  After all, I know first-hand how difficult it can be to crank out a haiku, a form that places supreme value on economy.

So I gave it a try.  Of course I had heard ABBA before – had listened to this very album, as a matter of fact.  The music hadn’t changed, but my attitude had.  What had previously been a guilty pleasure at best is now just a pleasure.  Sure it’s spun sugar – all artifice and sweetness, and occasionally it will stick to things you’d rather it didn’t, like your head just before a long car ride with someone else, but hey, sweetness and optimism take work.

Anyhow, Mr. Moon (author of the book) commends the songs “S.O.S.”, “Dancing Queen”, “Waterloo”, and “Fernando” to your particular attention, and I join him in recommending “Take A Chance On Me” as an especial favorite.

For new converts, Moon recommends Arrival as a good place to dig deeper into ABBA, and in this age of mp3 downloads I feel compelled to add the single “The Day Before You Came” to that recommendation.

For those looking to continue their music exploration in a similar vein, Mr. Moon suggests The Cardigans’ Life, followed by Duran Duran’s Rio.  If you follow these paths, let me know how it turns out – I am pressing on to a selection from the letter “B” later today.