What makes this album great is the way it caught lightning in a bottle.  The first four Eagles records had established the band as the premier country-rock act in the world.  They were impressively centered, creating a distinctive laid-back sound and easygoing vibe which they just hit dead-center again and again, producing gems like “Tequila Sunrise”, “Desperado”, “Peaceful Easy Feeling”, and “Already Gone”.

After four albums, though, the groove was threatening to become a rut, so the departure of founding member Bernie Leadon, which might at other times have been a greeted with a great wringing of hands, turned out to be a blessing in disguise.  The songwriting team of Don Henley and Glenn Frey was still intact, and one of the band’s greatest strengths to this point had been their sensitive lyrics, which were just perfect for Henley, whose great gifts as a singer are a raspy sawdust-on-the-floor voice and the ability to sing gently – rare enough in rock music.  Leadon’s replacement, Joe Walsh, brought just the right combustible element to counterbalance these mellow fellows, and gave the group something it badly needed: rockstar swagger.

You can hear it in the revved-up “Life in the Fast Lane”, or the discontented growl of the guitar that opens “Victim of Love” – this band now has attitude.  The team of Henley and Frey have discovered a new edge in their writing as well, cranking out an album full of sharp social criticism.  Any way you slice it, this album represents the very best moment in the career of one of America’s best bands.

I love the title track, of course, a six-and-a-half minute epic which sketches out a memorably surreal depiction of showbiz decadence and tops it off with some of the best guitar work in the rock canon.  After that, my favorite track on the album is probably “Victim of Love”.  Here’s where Henley and Frey’s insightful take on matters of the heart grows talons, helped considerably by some surly guitar from Walsh and Don Felder.

“Life in the Fast Lane” is essential listening as well, combining as it does the band’s hardest-rocking moment with some killer turns of phrase (I’ve always been fond of the line “He was brutally handsome, and she was terminally pretty”).  Other high points are the melancholy saga “The Last Resort”, and “New Kid in Town”.

I have a coworker who occasionally brings in snacks for the general-purpose munching of the “office” (I am generally included in this group, even though I spend most of my time in the workshop, not the office).  I am grateful for this.

I am still more grateful that, the other day, this coworker brought in some wasabi peas.  I don’t really care for wasabi peas, mind you, but I have another coworker who had no idea what they are.

I am grateful that I was standing there when he took his first heaping handful.

Ironically, this downturn in my physical well-being equates to a momentary rejuvenation for my blog!  And in order that this not prove to be a lone spike in its flat ekg line, I am going to try to hammer out a few more posts today.  I will then stash these away for future use, dispensing one every day or two while I try to get back into the swing of blogging every day.

Anyway, I have a couple of decent stories to tell in these posts, and three albums from the music experiment to discuss, and a few other odds and ends, so stay tuned…

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.