iTunes: What's wrong with me?

I've had this iTunes gift card for, well, a couple of years. For a long time, I didn't use it because I had dial-up, but I've had Broadband for several months now and I finally got around to using it.

So I'm all geeked up. Time to find all those songs I enjoy immensely, but would never buy the album they appeared on. Just like my own private Time Warner commercial! Now was the time for stuff like Tony Joe White's Polk Salad Annie, the kind of gritty shit that usually pushes my buttons and gives me my indefatigable SJ street cred. :

I'd been preparing for this day, to the point of writing down individual songs in the car I heard off XM to remind me of stuff to download.

So I use up $15 and what do I see when I'm done? I somehow morphed into Seventies Soft Rock Simpering Ass.

Oh I downloaded the aforementioned Polk Salad Annie, which kicked requisite ass. I then grabbed the long sought after Outa Space by Billy Preston, I'm a sucker for funk electric piano/organ/clavinet instrumentals.

Then, drunk in an anticipatory mist like a child's Christmas morning, I look at my XM list. Scribbled in messy blue ballpoint ink that indicated I was trying to augment my list while driving 80 down the interstate is Bitch Is Back by Elton John. Definitely need that, that song rocks.

Then I see the forest of iTunes Elton John choices. I own the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album and have long had Someone Saved My Life Tonight from back in the Napster days, but have little else Elton in my collection including the ubiquitous Greatest Hits. So I have to have Rocket Man, right? Click ...

But if I get Rocket Man, how can I not have Philadelphia Freedom? It's a disco sellout, but a good disco sellout. And who doesn't need a tribute to the hotness of Billie Jean King in their collection? Fucking A, I'm on that shit.

Little did I know the primrose path to disco-ish Lite Rock hell I had already begun to tread. Philadelphia Freedom? Say that reminds me, I loved December 1963 by Frankie Valli ever since it was one of the earliest songs I remembered as a pre-schooler in the mid 70s. Had it on my Disco Duck record. Well, some version of it anyway. Bring me the Valli ...

This is where I started going off the tracks. Somehow, I then thought it was a great idea to download Who Loves You, also by Valli from the same album. Not as famous, but also a big hit. Saw it there, convinced myself it had a "trippy" intro and threw 99 cents into Valli's royalty coffers.

I didn't know it at the time, but it was in the midst of some mid 70s domestic wife, Stepford Wives-like acid trip. Still with my mind squarely in the disco, the album version of K.C. & The Sunshine Band's Get Down Tonight followed.

Next up was Chicago's If You Leave Me Now, and there's really no excuse for that is there? I recovered a bit by also grabbing Questions 67 & 68 from Chicago Transit Authority, but then went right back into the Lite Rock shitter by getting the Commodores' Easy, not just any Easy, mind you, but the extended version.

I think I justified it by thinking maybe the Easy guitar solo was longer, but since I was in mid 70s domestic wife acid trip mode, for all I know, I was thinking of a Smokey And The Bandit-era Burt Reynolds posing naked in Playgirl with a bunch of Shar-Pei puppies crawling all over his body or something.

What the FUCK is wrong with me? I knew I was far gone when I did a search for Janis Ian, looking for At Seventeen. Somehow I convinced myself I identified with that song, like it reminded me of my first period or something -- running through a field of lilies in a sun dress ready to explore the allegory between my biology and the feminine freedom it represented.

Then, like a LP scratch, I snapped out of it. I looked at my list, made up my mind it decidedly did NOT rock. I immediately downloaded Otis Redding's Hard To Handle just to get back in the Southern soul place I started in with Polk Salad Annie.

But I only had two songs left. I punted, downloading Lynyrd Skynyrd's Ballad Of Curtis Loew and Humble Pie's Smokin' album track I Wonder, which I once had on the greatest mix tape I ever made (filled with Stones bootlegs I've still never totally replaced) that some soulless fucker stole out of my car at Ball State the month I graduated.

Moral? iTunes is dangerous in the wrong hands.





(I actually love all those songs I downloaded and never searched At Seventeen, though I did have my first period today.)

 

You type too much; I stopped reading after the first two paragraphs. What's this thread about?

 

You had your first period today? Remind me to send you a Hallmark card.

And play Neil Diamond's "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon" in your honor.

 

Nothing wrong with the version "Easy" that you downloaded, because that's a classic. But ... for some reason, I love the Faith No More version better, actually. I can see you downloading all those songs, though. It's that BYH Classic vibe.

 

BYH skews 80s, while I skew 70s, even though I'm definitely a child of the 80s (and love many of the same songs BYH does, though not all that Journey shit. Hi BYH! ).

It's probably because I'm the oldest child of young parents (and younger aunts and uncles) who were listening to a lot of that stuff in the 70s.

Ah ... Who Loves You just popped on. Probably heard it on my way home from preschool on AM or something in '76. Sounds like Monday Night Football halftime highlights.

 

Bubbler,

Don't forget Exile. Is it country? Is it rock? Is it blues? Or is it just damn good?

Kiss You All Over, one of the great stripper songs of all time.

 

Exile is to music as Every Which Way But Loose is to movies.

I don't know what that means, but Every Which Way But Loose is a little bit country, a little bit Cannonball Run, a little bit road movie, and a whole lot of good!

OK ... the only thing it has going for it is Clint Eastwood and Clyde the orangutan getting laid to the tune of Charlie Rich's Behind Closed Doors.

 

Exile = Rock band that had a song covered by Alabama and suddenly saw dollar signs in Nashville.

Probably extended their shelf life by 10 years, so a smart move.