1001 Disco Days

Oh man, such a pleasure to go through these treasures. So many good riffs and lines. A time and a place captured and kept fresh.  Dance score: 8.3 (note, score only partially due to strength of album. Other factors, like coffee and MJ strength, attitude, etc, play in. But the album does more of the work than anything else.) These lyrics cracked me up. Hits close to home though. Young punk calling me out. (But I have hundreds of dances still to go. And you're dead. So there! Love you though.) Too Pooped to Pop Casey is an old man who wants to be a teen He goes to all the dances and they call him cha-cha King He cha-cha's when the band is playin' rock and roll He tries to keep in time but the beat leaves him cold Because he's too pooped to pop, too old a soul Hips gettin' weaker when he tries to do this stroll And every time his feet get to go in one way Here comes a new dance and it's goin' to stray Chicks told Casey, you better move...

It's 1959 now. Waited 2 years for this one to come out. (I'm imagining this.) But I've bought most of the singles. I love the cover. It is is one of the most delicious covers I've ever seen. So many classic songs, even more than on the last two albums. Worth the wait.  But I'm hurting. The woman I love needs more from me. So I sacrifice side two and clean house. Actually what I do is try to bring the music into the chores. I try to dance the chores. This is part of my goal of carrying the dance forward into the rest of the day. Let it shake through me like Berry's guitar, like Johnnie Johnson's piano.  And one song leads me to it. One set of lyrics. That's the other thing about listening to a record every morning. The lyrics so often lead you to where you need to be, like the voice of God. You find it in the lyrics. This one from Queenie. Meanwhile I was still thinking If it's a slow one, we'll omit it If it's...

An album on a phone. Better than no album. Much better. But I'm fantasizing this was the original vinyl. That it is 1957 and this just came out. Just a few month's after After School Sessions. And I've already bought a few of the singles. Half the album I already know. But this is a Long Player. A full dance session. 45 minutes of raw guitar driven bliss. Even the throwaway moments are good. Jokes, attitude, freedom. Little 2 minute jolts of creative energy and verve propelling through my body. Johnnie Johnson's piano ringing through my arms and wiggling in my fingers, Berry's guitar making me duck walk.

So, a new series, already started really, but in full effect now. Using vinyl LP (Long Player) format to frame a daily dance. A new album every damn day. (with occasional DJ sets for inspiration.) Today I was inspired by a New Yorker article on Chuck Berry to go back and listen to his discography. I listened to the first full record from 1957, After School Session. What a greatg title. There's a sexual connatation to "session", and a musical one too. Now that school is over, let's party. But another connatation takes hold as the record goes on and you realize that the songs form a kind of moral narrative, and this is music that comes after learning your lessons. The album announces its intention off the bat with School Days. It opens with 12 staccato strokes of a guitar that immitates a school bell and then, "Up in the morning and out to school" and off we go. I'm not sure if I've ever heard a more promising opening to an album. The song...

In the basement again trying hard on a Sunday afternoon to get back into Joel's Afternoon Sound Alternative again, to explore it deeper. And a few times I succeeded. Worth the effort for sure. A maintenance dance. Shout out to Mierle Ukeles' Maintenance Art. (And this article I wrote on Ukeles on Fanzine: http://thefanzine.com/mierle-laderman-ukeless-maintenance-art/) l

393 Dances. Funny how I kind of want them to tick by, to reach a goal, and I kind of want them to slow down, so I never reach my goal. This morning so many ideas flowed through me. Weird ideas. Like to make a tack that appears to be a rusty railroad tie. (So I could tack up posters with old railroad ties, that's why.) But one idea took hold and that's this. May it be so, even if only in ones and zeros. (As Lucia said yesterday, there is only one thing you need to know. Zero plus one is one. Actually there's only two things you need to know. One minus one is zero.) Have a silent disco style Sunday morning rave on the regular, hosted by Conduit. Maybe in Doughboy park. Maybe in Calvary Cemetery. Maybe in the perfect dance floor next to the unisphere in Flushing. That would be dope! 7-9pm on Sunday mornings. Or maybe it's not silent? Would it be better with a giant boombox? I could try it both ways. First dance would be what I listened to this morning, Joel Davis...

Dance in basement to Joel Davis' latest Morning Sound Alternative on AfterFM.com Sometimes I feel like the radio is preaching to me. "Be here now, feel your body move to the music." "You can be a star, but it's gonna be tough going." And then I am dancing with Joanne Kyger, doing the mambo. Joanne died yesterday, so it was emotional to dance with her today. She moved through me.  

combining 2 solid but short dances here. First upstairs to first half dozen songs of SXSW hip hop playlist on Spotify. Second with girls at Lucia's Kindergarten Winter Wonderland Dance. That one was crazy because I had about 10 kids wanting me to pick them up and twirl them like I did Lucia, but I didn't really feel comfortable picking up other people's kids. But I could hardly dance because of those little hands reaching up and around me from all sides. "Shut Up And Dance With Me" is such a popular song with this set that the DJ played it twice.

I was craving rock and roll after yesterday's Modern Lovers, but when I went to Spotify for the likes I saw the last thing playing was Bach's Aria played by Glenn Gould, which was sent to me by Truck Darling (Jeni Olin get up!) who tagged me in a FB post, but it turned out to be perfect, thank you Henry James for the endless sentence variations, with bare intuitive transitions depending on who's paying attention, and the piece ws the best, the Bach, because my grandmother-in-law whom I have never met is dying, and I am thinking of her, but especially her son, and his daughter and her daughters, all whom I love and see clearly, all coming from her, and am so am feeling her loss, as well as her gain, I'm in bittersweet mourning,  and the Aria, especially as interpreted by the clairvoyant Glenn Gould, is such balm and salve for the mourning heart. The music accompanies the grief like...a mother.  Thinking of her, and how beautiful she must be knowing as I do her c...

Been awhile since I had a full-heart-throated dance, but this morning I did and a documentary about Danny Fields led me back to listen to Jonathon Richman, and so I listed to albums from the 80's and went wild. When you get to that point you are floating, and everything petty falls away, "it's magic, no not at random," gone with the wind. Then put on his album from 2008, "Because Her Beauty is Raw and Wild" And I found the lyrics to be some of the most beautiful I've ever heard, like a great rock and roll sermon, a real "secret-of-life" kind of album.

Whatching the end of Sean The Sheep movie with the girls and I start dancing, partly out of the joy of the brilliance of the film. Then put on The Beach Boys "Surfs Up," pick up the girls one after the other and have a kind of ballet carnival dance around the room with them to the strains of Brian Wilson's sonic pop brilliance. What music! What dance partners! What life!