The Stray Cats at Festival de Jazz de Montreux 1981

On a nostalgic bent.

Remember watching these guys with amazement at this festival.

Best Album Covers (Remember Them?)

To continue a trend: Rolling Stone Magazine has now published a reader survey driven or rather reader nominated, top album covers of all time list.

This is spite of the fact that most people these days have never seen a proper album cover seeing as they down load their music, with the cover 'cover' being a separate file to be barely glanced at. Or their music is streamed onto a device that renders the album art work a tiny picture, again just barley glanced at.

Of course lets not forget those terrible pull out CD inserts: did they make them so you could not get them out of those crappy palstic cases without ripping them apart? A great way to look at the album cover.

And no, we do not have Pandora.com outside the US, so all that great music discovery online with  the album covers is denied the rest of the world.

Music business = bunch of wasters.

see Readers Poll: The Best Album Covers of All Time

Back to the collection: they are fine enough collection in themselves but not one of them would make it in my list.

Where's the original 1969 Santana cover? For example...

Best Songs of the Sixties

Image by Affendaddy via FlickrRolling Stone Magazine's readers picks.

see Rolling Stone Readers Pick the Top 10 Songs of the Sixties

My favorite?

Jimi Hendrix "All Along the Watchtower"

This is not the best live recorded version of 'Watchtower' but it seems to be the only one available.

Like most live music filming in the sixties the camera pans wildly around, either wide focusing on nothing in particular, or going into almost porno-like close ups for far too long.

It was filmed at the Isle of Wright festival, with the recordings of Jimi Hendrix at that festival having a deep sense of forbidding about them. And that's not hindsight: listen to the album.

Jimi would be dead just 18 days later.

The Future of Publishing

Referring back to my previous post

Online Digital Music - Pandora's Box

Now why can't the music industry do the same thing?

See from SAI Business Insider

"he gets to keep 70% of her book sales -- and she sells around 100,000 copies per month."

Full article This 26-Year-Old Is Making Millions Cutting Out Traditional Publishers With Amazon Kindle

The Death of the Music Industry

For once I have not attempted to re-write the heading as this one from SAI Business Insider just says it all.

Article The Death of the Music Industry

Rolling Stone Magazine: The Greatest Rock and Roll Christmas Songs

"Most rock fans assume that all Christmas music is terrible. They're mostly right, but every once in a while a Christmas miracle happens — and a great holiday song gets produced. Some of the best examples come from 1963's Phil Spector's Christmas Album"

The Greatest Rock and Roll Christmas Songs

Some of them have embedded You Tube videos.