FOMM: Five For The Bees

There are two parts to learning about the birds and the bees.
Last week it was the birds. This week it's the bees.

As in Bee Gees. They've just released The Studio Albums 1967-1968 a box set of their first three Polydor albums ( 1st Album, Horizontal, and Idea) with complete mono and stereo mixes of each album and tons of singles, outtakes, and other bonus tracks.

Anyone who doesn't like the Bee Gees because of excess baggage from their late 70s gold chains era, should immerse themselves in their early albums (not just the hit singles but the albums) before making any judgements. Having all the songs in both stereo and mono is probably overkill, but the Bee Gees rule, and not liking them is weird.

Here are five covers of early Bee Gees tracks, recorded between 1983 and 2006. Artists link to artist info and tracks link to mp3s.

1. The Three O' Clock - In My Own Time
   (1983, from Sixteen Tambourines)
2. Moxy Fruvous - I've Gotta Get A Message to You
   (1997, from You Will Go To The Moon)
3. The Jigsaw Seen - Melody Fair
   (2002, from Songs Mama Used To Sing)
4. The Lucksmiths - I Started A Joke
   (2005, from "The Chapter In Your Life Entitled SF" single)
5. Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs - Run To Me
   (2006, from Under The Covers: Volume 1)

Bonus cover from the Bees' Saturday Night Fever disco era:
Baby Lemonade - How Deep Is Your Love?
(1994, from Melody Fair, one of the best tribute albums ever!)

I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle

This week is the Amgen Tour of California, a 7-day, 700 mile, bike race from SF to Long Beach. All the big names are here, and it's exciting to see Levi Leipheimer and Ivan Basso riding in familiar Northern California scenery. This is only the second year, but it's already the biggest bike race in North America, and they're aiming to make it a major stage race like the tours of Italy, Spain, and France.

I watched some of the prologue on Sunday in SF. It was a short 1.9 mile jaunt from the Ferry Building to the Coit Tower, but they were riding as fast up Telegraph Hill as I could ride downhill with a fair tail wind!

Yesterday's stage was from Stockton to San Jose, and it was fun to watch the riders on the same roads I bike occasionally. Just finishing the Calaveras Rd. loop is a major accomplishment for me, but the pros average about 20-25 mph and ride the ten miles in less than 30 minutes, before going on to an even more severe ride over Sierra grade to San Jose. When I'm in better shape in the summer, I top out at around 20mph on a bicycle. These riders average that over 100 miles!

Hopefully the tour will stay around and keep getting bigger. It is ironic that the race is sponsored by the company that makes EPO (the #1 banned drug in pro cycling). It's like the San Francisco Giants playing at Balco Park.

Living With the Lightning

Touch and Go has just added another mp3 from Ted Leo's upcoming album Living With The Living. The new mp3, "Bomb.Repeat.Bomb" is another wild rocker just like "Sons of Cain" (which was previously posted at the label and pitchfork). Judging from these two songs and the titles of the others, this is Ted's angry political album.

I downloaded "Sons Of Cain" a few weeks ago, and the riff sounded eerily familiar like I'd heard it somewhere before. Yesterday I realized it sounds a little like "Remember The Lightning" by 20/20. Here are both songs for a 2fs side-by-side comparison. Any excuse to kick it with some old school power pop!

Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - Sons of Cain
20/20 - Remember The Lightning

I bought tickets for Ted Leo's upcoming show at the GAMH in a couple of weeks without realizing it was a S.F. Noise Pop show with three opening acts: Georgie James, So Many Dynamos, Pony Come Lately. That might be a late one. After last weekend's auto adventure, I'm still not going to drive to the show, so hopefully the 8pm show will wrap up by midnight before the BART stops running. By the way, I now have a new $200 car window, just in time for tomorrow's rainstorm.

Broken bits of you and my window

Went to see the Smithereens last night at the Red Devil Lounge. I hadn't been to the Red Devil in a long time, and didn't realize what a tiny place it was. It's a tiny little hole (in every sense of the word) that was packed for the Smithereens. They were touring behind their Beatles tribute Meet the Smithereens, so the crowd was an interesting dynamic of older Beatle-geeks and younger (my age) 80s-geeks.

DiNizio lost his voice after the eighth song, so they started playing more of their quieter less vocally challenging songs ("In a Lonely Place", "Cigarette", "Especially For You") which also tend to be my favorites, as well as letting Jim Babjak and Dennis Diken take turns as George and Ringo on "Don't Bother Me" and "I Wanna Be Your Man" during the Meet The Beatles interlude. They said they hadn't played SF since 1992, and I hadn't seen them since way back in the 1980s.

Unfortunately, I was parked on a busy street (Van Ness) , and some idiot broke the side window on my car. They didn't take anything, didn't even break in, just smashed the side window to smithereens in a senseless act of vandalism. And I just raised my insurance deductible, so I'll have to replace it myself. But they can't replace it today because it's a holiday. Senseless vandalism sucks!

Between the theft and the vandalism and the traffic and $4 bridge tolls and parking tickets, I've pretty much decided to stop driving to SF for awhile. Like Garry Templeton once said, "If I ain't BARTin', I ain't departin' "

You got Zitoed!

Seeing photos of Barry Zito pitching in his new orange and black Giants uniform this week has helped me come to grips with the fact that he doesn't pitch for Oakland anymore. Barry was always my favorite of the A's so-called "big three", and even though I was prepared to see him playing for another team this year, it's still kind if jarring to see photographic evidence. At least he just moved across the bay, so I can still watch him pitch.

In Mychael Urban's book Aces: The Last Season On The Mound With The Oakland A’s Big Three: Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito (a long title with two colons), Zito comes across as the most interesting of the big three by far. He surfs, acts, dates actresses, dabbles in "music" (or some Dave Matthewsy variant thereof), and in short leads a very interesting life. Both Hudson and Mulder fizzled out after signing their big contracts and moving to the NL, but Zito should do fine with the Giants.

In that book, Urban explains Zito's views on pitching, which come down to some zenlike "throw my pitches, hit my spots, and don't worry about results". No worries about about getting inside his own head, because Barry's always inside his own head. Sometimes he'll say "I think I pitched pretty well" after giving up six runs and getting chased in the fourth inning, and sometimes he'll say "I had nothing out there" after a four hit shutout. Zito focuses the things he can control (the speed, location, and delivery of his pitches) and doesn't worry about the other things. He's like an anti-headcase!

Anyway, in the first few days of Giants camp, since there's nothing much to talk about, there's was this mini brouhaha about Barry Zito altering his pitching delivery to increase his leg drive. On Friday, pitching coach Dave Righetti expressed concerns that he might injure himself with that directory, and the S.F. Chronicle reported that it was like "Michelangelo arriving for his new job at the Sistine Chapel and announcing he is going to paint still lifes".

Zito must have seen that Michelangelo quote, because yesterday he said the new delivery was just an experimental work in progress and told the same writer (in one of the best sports quotes ever). "You don't look at a Michelangelo sculpture halfway done and start commenting on how terrible it is.. you wait until the final product." Today, the Chronicle reported that Zito's new delivery was a non-story that was somehow blown out of proportion. Blown out of proportion by the media (including the Chronicle), I hasten to add.

It's fortunate that the Giants have learned to say "that's just Barry being Barry" over the past few years, because I get the feeling they'll be saying it twice as often in 2007.

Four decades of bird bands

Sunday is Chinese New Year, and this is the year of the boar, so here are four songs from four decades by four bands, all named after ... birds!

From the 1960s:
The Yardbirds - Happenings Ten Years Time Ago
(from the album Roger The Engineer )
This song is from the few months in 1966 when the Yardbirds had two lead guitarists (Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page), and features a session bassist named John Paul Jones instead of Paul Samwell-Smith. The Yardbirds' first leaden zeppelinic steps . We're skipping the 1970s, so take a moment to yell "Freebird" really loud!


From the 1980s:
The Hummingbirds - Word Gets Around
(from the album Love Buzz)
The Hummingbirds were from Australia, and their album was produced by Mitch Easter, so you know what to expect. Lots of guitars and male-female vocal harmonies. Some band from Aberdeen WA covered the song "Love Buzz" (by the Shocking Blue) at the same time. 1989 was the year of the love buzz.

From the 1990s:
The Mutton Birds - She's Been Talking
(from the album Envy of Angels)
The Mutton Birds were from New Zealand, and were named after an actual bird from the South Pacific. Envy of Angels is probably their best album, and also the one that's the easiest to find in the US. You can buy it for $10 here or here, while all the other Mutton Birds CDs are $25 or more. It could be your new favorite album too. They broke up at the end of the 90s, but Don McGlashan put out a solo album last year (from which I posted a song last week), and Alan Gregg leads the band Marshmallow who put out a great CD a couple years ago.

From the 2000s:
The Bye Bye Blackbirds - In Every Season
(from the CD Honeymoon)
The person who deserves at least co-credit for turning me on to the Mutton Birds is Bradley of the Bye Bye Blackbirds, so it seems apt to follow the MBs with the BBBs. This song is from their EP Honeymoon, which came out late last year, and the mp3 links directly from the band site. If you don't have the CD, you can order it here, or pick one up on March 29th when they open for Mitch Easter at the Rickshaw Stop.

Bonus tracks: 125records reported that the French band Swan Plastic Swan have a few tracks from their Scott Miller produced demo on their myspace page. They call themselves "psychiatric music lovers", which is probably an incorrect translation of "psychotic music lovers" or something else, but I like it, because I'm a psychiatric music lover too. Aren't we all?

The Moneyball Manifesto

In preparation for the baseball season, I've updated my blogroll with a couple of my favorite baseball sites, Catfish Stew and Athletics Nation (yes, I'm an A's fan). These blogs publish year round, but I can't read about baseball during the offseason, so last year I stopped reading my baseball blogs as soon as Magglio Ordonez hit the homerun that knocked the Athletics out of the playoffs.

I've also reread the Michael Lewis Moneyball book in preparation for this season. This book came out in 2003, and I didn't read it until a year later when it showed up in paperback, but I've read it every year for the last four at the start of the baseball season. It's probably one of my favorite books of this millennium (sports or otherwise).

Moneyball explains how A's GM Billy Beane built a winning team on a shoestring budget by building up the farm system and trading for players that were undervalued by other teams. In other words, "exploiting market inefficiencies". When the book was written, the baseball stat that was most undervalued was on base percentage (OBP), so Beane and his assistant GM Paul DePodesta sought after players who got on base. It seems obvious that OBP is the most important offensive statistic in baseball, since the object of a game is to score more runs than the other team, and in order to score a run, you must first get on base.

This theory was viewed as heresy by the baseball establishment, from the five tool scouts to old school announcers who played the game, but it has proved to work, so now most teams use OBP (and it's cousin OPS) as a good indicator of offensive efficiency. So for the last couple of years, the A's have started exploiting other market inefficiencies to find qualities that are undervalued by teams that are doing what they were doing five years ago.

It's fun to contrast the economic theories of Moneyball, which is how Lewis (a financial writer famous for the book Liars Poker about Wall Street) tackled the story versus the sabermetric "moneyball" theories (get on base, don' t waste outs) that the baseball world thinks of when they hear the term. The Billy Beane A's are successful because they go against the grain and zig when everyone else zags, not because they have some secret baseball formula
that no one knows about.

And now that I've finished reading Moneyball, I'm ready to start watching baseball again. Camps open next week for all players.