Hiding under the chair

That’s where the CD I’m listening to now was; it fell off the CD tower that stands just behind the “bamboo chair,” an almost-wing chair covered in a bamboo-print fabric in the living room, and L found it when she moved the chair to sweep under it.  (Since our house is so small and so cluttered with so much Stuph, furniture rarely gets moved around, because it only fits one way and in one place.)  It’s one of the few albums I have in vinyl that I actually replaced with a CD, because my vinyl copy has a nasty unplayable-type scratch on it, so I couldn’t dub it to CD myself.  Mind, this isn’t the only vinyl album I have with an unplayable-type scratch on it, but it’s the one of the very few I thought enough of to replace with a CD.

Elijah Wald said Sunday Street was the greatest single album Dave Van Ronk ever made, and with the possible exception of the Folksinger album from 1963 or the very early stuff Dave recorded from ’59 to ’61 on Folkways, he might be right.  There’s nothing here but Dave, his guitar and that astonishing voice that growls, whoops, hollers, squalls and whispers across all but two of the tracks, which are astonishing in their own right—how many other guitarists, outside of Leo Kottke, can you name who would even try to play guitar transcriptions of Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton piano solos?

From first to last, there’s only one track I’m not in love with (“Jesus Met the Woman at the Well,” which is a song I don’t like of itself).  The self-penned title track is a great singer’s problem and a lot of fun.  Dave wrote, “Most twelve bar blues have only two lines of lyrics per verse, which is all right, if somewhat predictable.  I tried to make this one a little different by giving each musical line a separate lyric, thus reaching a grand total of six lines—and absolutely no spot for the singer to inhale.  Back to two lines.”  He gets through it anyway.  He’s so closely miked throughout whole album that you can hear his puffing and snorting as he plays, which is kinda funny and less distracting than Glenn Gould’s humming used to be.

I figured up the balance in my checking account today and found that I’m still four hundred dollars and a bit short of being able to make this month’s payment plus the late fee.  And the phone company sent a cutoff notice saying they have to have a hundred and thirty dollars by Tuesday week.  Yes, I’m working, but the cash flow ain’t.

Middle-Earth is a lovely vivid oar.  Fnord.