60's psychedelic confusion

There's so much on my ipod that when a song comes up, I don't always know what it is, so there's a few seconds of fun trying to figure out what it is. The other day, some strange obviously psychedelic song came on, and at first I thought it was the Electric Prunes (I have both the first album and Underground ripped from vinyl...nothing else is really the Electric Prunes anyway). Turns out it was Flaming by Pink Floyd.

Speaking of psychedelic, I watched the Roky Ericson/13th Floor Elevators movie on Netflix. I can't say the movie was enjoyable...but somewhat worth watching anyway. I had heard vague things about the life of Roky (similar story as Sid Barrett), but the movie filled in the details. "You're Gonna Miss Me" is an awesome song, though. And I got around to ripping my CD of 13th Floor Elevators...since the only song I really know is "You're Gonna Miss Me", it should be fun trying to recognize the other songs.

Chrome and MGMT

Rolling Stone magazine ran a piece a while ago where they asked a bunch of artists to list their favorite tracks. One of the more interesting lists was from MGMT. Now, I am not at all familiar with MGMT, I could not name a single song of theirs to save my life (I only later got some idea of who they are), and the only specific thing I remember about their list was that it included "Pygmies in Zee Park" by Chrome.

I have the Chrome Box set, on vinyl, and spent some time ripping it to mp3 about a year ago, and labeling all the tracks and such...but never became really familiar with all of their work. When I played vinyl, I would mostly play the Chronicles I and II albums, which only had one to three tracks per side, so those tracks I could actually remember the titles of, and I could recognize them when they came up on my iPod (see first post).

But "Pygmies in Zee Park" is on the Alien Soundtracks album, so I wasn't all that familiar with it, and a lot of the album (or maybe some of the other albums) have songs that are just rhythmic noises, so I had no hope of remembering what the names of those tracks were (one song, "All Data Lost", sounds kind of like, well, all data being lost). I had always assumed that "Pygmies..." was one of those rhythmic noise tracks, so I wondered why it would be a favorite track of anyone's, including some band I had never heard of.

Then one day whilst listening to my iPod, a song came on where I definitely heard the words "pygmies in zee park." I looked down at my player, and it was a Chrome song, but it had some other title. It turns out that, at least for Alien Soundtracks, I had mixed up the sides of the album while labeling the tracks. Later I heard the phrase "ST 37" on some track that was not labeled "ST 37."

So all this time I was not listening to the "songs" that I thought I was listening to. It was kind of hard finding the song boundaries, because one song would sometimes run into another, but I thought I had done a pretty good job of it. Maybe if I find the time I'll go back and fix it (I still have the tracks in Audacity)...then again, maybe not.

Welcome to my blogosphere

This is my attempt at starting a blog, with the theme of random thoughts and digressions related to hitting "Shuffle All" on my music device (can I call it an iPod even though it's not an iPod...I could call it an mp3 player, but it can play more than mp3's...I predict "iPod" will become a generic word anyway like "Xerox" or "Kleenex" or ...). Anyway, the blog name of just "Shuffle All" was already taken, but not my idea for the blog theme, thus the name of this blog.

Well, that's the first post...we'll see where it goes and how long this lasts...