Last week a few of my coworkers inspired me with this blog post: Alex took a quick snapshot of Mark holding up one of the cassette tapes in his car, saying he hadn't seen a tape in ages.
Who still has cassette tapes anymore? I have a shoebox full of them
but no way to play them. But as you can see from the design of this
blog (courtesy of the brilliant Marc Johns), cassettes still hold a
place in my heart.
So, I'm putting together a gallery of people holding one (or more) of their cassette tapes. Send me a recent photo of you holding one of your own cassette tapes and I'll add it to the Don't Forget Cassettes photo gallery. Look, over there to the right, in the sidebar of my blog and you'll see
the link to the gallery. So far I've got photos from Ginevra and Mark,
but I want more!
Limited time offer: If you send me your photo AND your mailing address, I will mail you a nice thank you note via the USPS.
I have another plucked-from-the-online-masses rock n' roll success story to share with you. Borrowing some inspiration from the way Journey found their current lead singer, the rock group Boston found their new singer - a fan from Charlotte, North Carolina - when they ran across his MySpace page.
Tommy DeCarlo, a manager at Home Depot, is a 43 year old father of two and a Boston superfan who memorized all their songs. After Boston's lead singer Brad Delp committed suicide in 2007, DeCarlo's daughter Talia uploaded some tracks of him singing along to Boston songs to share with other grieving fans. According to DeCarlo's bio, he "had to sing with the karaoke track because he had sold his
keyboard in 2006, using the extra cash to buy Christmas presents for
his children."
Boston founder and guitarist Tom Scholz was sitting at home one day while his wife was on the computer. He heard a track coming from the speakers and asked which live Boston performance it was. She explained that it wasn't an old live recording of Boston, it was a karaoke track from an unknown fan in North Carolina. Due to the amazing similarities, Scholz took a bit of convincing that it wasn't original singer Brad Delp's voice.
The band reached out to DeCarlo, flying him and his family out for an audition. Since DeCarlo had never been in a band before, his first live performance ever was singing with his favorite band Boston at a tribute to the late Brad Delp. He's now taken leave from his job at Home Depot (couldn't he have just quit?) to tour with Boston as their lead singer this summer. Remember, kids, share what you love with the internets and your wishes just might come true!
Here's a clip of DeCarlo performing with Boston at the tribute:
Let's wrap up this post with a truly live version of Boston's epic folk/prog/rock masterpiece "More Than A Feelin'" from 1979:
Steve (my scooter mentor): Have you named your scooter yet?
Me: No. All I know is that she's a she.
Steve: How are things going?
Me: Great! There's been an evolution over the past few weeks. I'm finally feeling more comfortable with speed, it's actually taking me less time to get to work now. I'm really zipping around!
Steve: It's great that you're feeling comfortable, but now that you're feeling more confident it can almost be more dangerous because you're paying less attention. You gotta stay frosty.
Me: Stay frosty? I've never heard that before. It's good advice!
Steve: Maybe you should name your scooter Frosty.
Me: Ooh, I like it!
~
Bonus: Listen to this NPR interview with Barry Gwin from the SF Scooter Centre, where I bought Frosty, about the rising popularity of scooters. In my experience, the 100 mpg selling point is a myth; I've been getting around 75 miles per gallon. It is pretty amazing filling up at the gas station for less than five bucks, and riding around for a few weeks before I need to top off the tank again.
I'm out of the loop on new music right now, I will freely admit this. But I ran across something new this morning - purely by accident!
I'd logged into iTunes to download the latest New Yorker fiction podcast to my iPhone, when I noticed a promo for Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl". Wondering if it was a cover of Jill Sobule's hit from back in the day, I clicked through to listen to the thirty second clip. I found out it's not a cover of Jill's old song, and I found out that I liked the track. I liked the production. I also liked Perry's voice. There are traces of Rihanna's "S.O.S." in the song, but it still sounds fresh. Here's the video:
Who is Katy Perry?, I asked myself. Judging by the prominent ad placement by Capitol on the iTunes store
home page, clearly she's a heavily promoted and marketed artist. She's all glammed up on this big budget video. But judging by her lyrics and the cover of her Ur So Gay EP, she's coming across as irreverent and
unpolished, the opposite of the stereotypically calculated puppets of
pop.
Intrigued enough to want to listen to her other songs, I fired up Rhapsody to find out what else I could hear of hers. All I could find was an EP featuring the single "Ur So Gay" which berates the subject of the song ("I hope you hang yourself with your H&M scarf.../You're so sad.../You're so skinny...") followed by the refrain "You're so gay and you don't even like boys". At first, being the New Yorker-reading fuddy duddy I am these days, I bristled at the lyrical content, worrying about the possible re-popularization of using the word "gay" in a derogatory way. I mean, retro production and imaging can be fun, but there are other areas where taking a step backward is not cool. But, perhaps the song "I Kissed A Girl (and I liked it)" can do some good for tolerance, rather than just encourage teen girls to kiss their best girlfriends in order to attract and impress teen guys?
But let's talk about the real offense: the third track on the Ur So Gay EP is a cover of The Outfield's "Your Love" (I got the cover wrong in an earlier draft of this post - I blame blogging after a long day). Well, not so much a cover as a reinterpretation, complete with new lyrics and the destruction of some of the best hooks of the song ("tonight, tonight, tonight!" Terrible!). Let's face it - "Your Love" is a pop masterpiece and just shouldn't be covered. By anyone. For any reason. Go buy the original, everyone, young and old -- it holds up. (I'd show you the amazingly '80s video here, but it's another case of embedding disabled by request. Thanks, Sony/BMG!)
The final track on the EP, "Lost", is a belter-ballad that might as well have been recorded by Kelly Clarkson and promoted and performed on an episode of "American Idol". It's so sincere! Where did the edginess go? I won't even get into the Christian gospel album Perry (née Katheryn Hudson) recorded back in '01, because we all reserve the right to change our minds.
But the question still remains: Who is Katy Perry?
Who still has cassette tapes anymore?
Keep the dream alive: send a photo of yourself holding a cassette tape to kteeger AT yahoo and I'll add it to the gallery.
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