There are ways you can spoil a beautiful evening.
You know what it's like when you find something on YouTube you haven't heard in about a billion years, and not only that, it's the WHOLE ALBUM so you'll be able to hear every track, and you put your headset on cuz it's late at night, and you start to listen and -
And at first it's great, and the memories just come flooding back. The living room in Chatham with the big reclining chair, and the old drapes with cherries on them and wall-to-wall carpeting like nobody else had yet (covering beautiful hardwood floor that was deemed ugly and old-fashioned). And we'd all be sitting around stoned while my parents were at choir practice, and I'd be sitting in a half-lotus on my camel saddle which smelled of shit and old leather, and somebody'd put this album on and Bob Webster (this jazz pianist who hung around, I was in love with him) would crawl along the floor and put his arms around the big cylindrical wooden speakers that were bigger than anyone else's and stay that way until the whole album was over.
And the album was MOOG. And we all mispronounced it because we were too ignorant to know it was pronounced "moag". And we man, really got off on this album which was really only good when you were stoned, because it was sort of all over the place - some of it brilliant - keyboard stuff in sweeps and drones, clever like commercials for Polaroid Swinger, or suddenly really inspired and beautiful. It was called The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman, who my brother described as hermaphroditic because of his name.
So about a billion years goes by and once in a while I look on YouTube and just find tiny fragments of Moog, mostly from scratchy records. I doubt it has ever been re-released. Then TONIGHT I find a video with the whole album on it, every track -
(and also this stuff, silly visual stuff like a kaleidoscope, sort of cool so I giffed it, and at the end you see the edge of the guy's TV screen so you know it's just some TV effect, except that at the start it looks like somebody shining a flashlight through a sock. And it has that VHS fuzzy frizzly part at the bottom, you know what I mean, bad tape or really cheap equipment. Reminds me of my first Beta recorder.)
And then all of a sudden on the right side of your headset, you're either having a flashback hallucination or the headset is picking up police signals or SOMEBODY, some asshole, is talking, aimlessly, stonedly, droningly, on and off so you keep hoping it has stopped, and sometimes there is a very dumb girl's voice always kind of going up like a very insecure person whose every statement sounds like a question, and later on you hear that rustling fumbling infuriating noise like when someone is dicking around with a microphone, and you realize this guy, whoever he is, must have sat there holding his 1973 Radio Shack Captain Marvel microphone up to his 1969 "Hear How Powerful My Speakers Are" speakers while the record turned on his dirty old mouse-shit turntable. Or maybe it was a spinning pancake. Whatever. This is someone's idea of a video? Sharing this timeless, stoned, OK-a-little-bit-too-commercial-and-cute-but-memory-laden album, this CLASSIC '60s stoner album - talking all the way through it in a draggy stoned voice, in the voice of someone who has an IQ of maybe 71 and was still voted Top of his Class because that's how they turn them out now, who
It ruined my evening.
POST-BLAHG. There is a God. I was gnerfing around in Dick Hyman videos just to see what else might be there, and by golly, just a couple of days ago somebody posted the whole album in pristine sound quality, no stoner babbling or fumbling 1969-quality mikes like the emcee at your Junior Prom. Until it's taken down for some reason, like piracy, here it is for you to enjoy. But I'm not taking my post down because it's an example of something, of taking something great and just throwing it up there all buggered up, as if it doesn't matter. Worse, most people neither notice nor care. I can't seem to embed the video here because it won't come up no matter what I do, so here's the link, and I'll post the video again so you can see the kind of album cover that has disappeared, along with normal global climate, rational Republicans and an expectation of a future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIutWZqoK-4
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