Boneyard Media

In ‘76 or so my mom took us to see Lady Aberlain and two purple pandas at the mall. Very happy memory. This record came with a gift bag that Lady A handed out to all the kids. Hear it as it now sounds.

Fred Rogers - “Around the Neighborhood: Puppet Voices”

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My parents bought this story 45 at K-mart for me when I was 8 or 9, I’m guessing. (It’s taken from the “U.S. of Archie” American history cartoons of the mid-70s.) My very favorite part of the record is still the first ten seconds. Hey hey hey. (Sometime in the early 80s, Dallas McKennon, the man who did Archie’s voice on these shows, sang lead on a hard-to-find record credited to the Archies called Drive the Boulevard.)

Archie - “The Great Divide”

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Sometimes the music you listen to merges perfectly with the moment. This happened to me with this French Kicks CD when I was stuck in a traffic jam surrounded by concrete spaghetti bowl highway construction. This wasn’t a bad thing—it made the otherwise unpleasant situation more interesting. So let’s try to recreate the moment. Listen and read:

Abutment: a retaining wall (see below) providing structural support for an overcrossing; Backfill: the mounds of earth (or other material) between a bridge abutment and the ground which hasn’t been dug up; Bott’s Dots: the little reflectors that keep cars in their lanes on an unfinished road; Clear and Grub: what all the tractors and bulldozers, etc. do prepare for the building of a new road; Crack and Seat Operations: this is done before a road is repaved - the workers crack the pavement and let it settle, which helps water drain easier and generally extends the life of a roadway; Falsework: this is a frame specially created to temporarily support the weight of a bridge, for example; Mechanically Stabilized Earth Walls: retaining walls that support earthfill embankments and use metal straps buried in the fill for anchors; Mitigation: various safeguards and actions taken to reduce a construction project’s impact on environmental resources; Pile Driving: more anchoring activity - this is when long concrete shafts are driven into the ground until hitting solid material, thereby becoming able to support structures; Retaining Wall: built to keep the earth from falling; Soundwall: usually built between the freeway and businesses close by in order to keep the noise down; Utility Potholing: this is a safety measure taken in order to locate and identify sewage and water pipes, electric lines, etc., by digging a small, deep hole where pipes are supposed to be.

French Kicks - “Wrong Side”

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1976 is my favorite baseball year for many reasons. Here’s one of them: The White Sox wore silly shorts for the first game of a double header vs. the Royals in August and then never wore them again. That’s Bucky Dent, Clay Carroll and Chet Lemon in the picture. I nabbed this photo from the Baseball Hall of Fame’s online exhibit of uniforms.

These UK geniuses had 8 top ten hits out yonder: “Hold Tight” (#4, 1966), “Hideaway” (#10, 1966), “Bend It” (#2, 1966), “Save Me” (#4, 1966), “Okay!” (#4, 1967), “Zabadak!” (#3, 1967), “Legend of Xandadu” (#1, 1968), “Last Night in Soho” (#8, 1968)

“Time was when the harmonica was something the Tom Sawyers of America carried around in their pockets, along with a jackknife and rabbit’s foot. Nothing much has happened to jackknives and rabbits’ feet, but the harmonica has come a long, long way.” (liner notes)

The Mulcays - “Til Then”

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Oscar Brand has recorded some 1,700,000 folk albums about all manner of subjects. He's probably recorded one about you, Dear Reader. Happy Thanksgiving.

Oscar Brand - “Henry Martin”

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Henry Thomas was an East Texan who recorded all of his most well known songs when he was in his fifties, then disappeared.

Some famous covers of his songs:

Bob Dylan - “Honey Won’t You Allow Me One More Chance” (1962), Canned Heat - “Going Up the Country” (1968, re-working of “Bull Doze Blues”), Taj Mahal - “Fishin’ Blues” (1969, also Lovin Spoonful (1965) and Holy Modal Rounders (1964)), Grateful Dead - “Don’t Ease Me In” 1980)

Henry Thomas - “Texas Easy Street”

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Welcome to the Boneyard, friends, where all manner of subjects - mostly arts/leisure/media - get dug up and pawed at randomly and attempts might even be made to “unite the joints,” so to speak. Here’s a small image of our mascot, Timothy Spall, who plays Mr. Venus in the BBC’s 1998 production of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Mr. Venus is what Dickens calls a “preserver of [dead] animals” and an “articulator” of skeletons. He continues on about the character like this: “The face looking up is a sallow face with weak eyes, surmounted by a tangle of reddish-dusty hair. The owner of the face has no cravat on, and has opened his tumbled shirt-collar to work with more ease.” Venus is a bitter sad-sack, and he spends most of the story involved in a conspiracy against our heroes, the Boffins. But he changes his ways in the end.