Zappa knew a thing or two.
Thursday, 1. November 2007, 16:54:59
So, I know you're all wondering what I've been up to whilst I was out there battling the ISP foe to a standstill. I can feel the vibrations. Either that or my hard drive is going down.
It seemed like the whole time that I was offline there was just an endless stream of blogworthy incidents happening. I guess that's what goes on when you're not online. Stuff happens. Certainly it seemed like at least twice a day something would happen which would make me think "Must blog this... Gah!!"
One thing I didn't expect to be blogging about was picking up a book called '40 years of NME charts' a few months ago.
Doesn't sound very promising, does it? Go ahead, you can say it, even now as I type this it sounds like the prologue to something I wouldn't bother to read. A blog about a book. Worse, a blog about a list of Hit Parades masquerading as a book. I think I'll stop right now.
Only I haven't. Nope. Still here.
For those not in the know, the New Musical Express was the first UK publication to feature the recorded music charts. Yup. Charts based upon the number of gramophone records sold in the previous week. Hard to imagine it was such a novel idea, eh? The fact is that until rock'n'roll and skiffle no one was particularly interested in what was selling, but once someone turned the electricity on - as another blogger somewhere once put it - there was no stopping us. Admittedly I was just a kid, but rock'n'roll was definitely different even to those of us still in short trousers, and (Much to my dad's chagrin), as soon as I realised that there were charts with the names of rock'n'roll and skiffle stuff in them, I wanted to see them. It was probably the only time dad wished that I hadn't learnt to read so early.
To my mother the idea that I might start school without being able to read was complete anathema, and with the aid of Korky the Kat, Little Plum (Your Redskin chum), and Desperate Dan in the Dandy and the Beano I started to learn to read. Dad never actively participated in 'putting the shoes on Willy', that I can remember, but he certainly approved to the point of not playing any of his 78s while I was learning. Little did he know that it was shortly to start costing him something in the region of 1/- a week.
The first thing I noticed as I perused the book for the first time, was that there was no rock'n'roll in the earliest charts, but since at that point I wasn't long seperated from my mother's womb I guess this was to be expected. The next thing I noticed was the mistakes. When you publish a weekly chart you can get away with the occasional error, but when they're later displayed in sequential order it becomes kinda easy to notice when a record vanishes from the charts for a week, only to come back the following week with a 'Last week's position' displayed alongside it. The 3rd thing I noticed was that you don't hear this music on the radio any more.
That 3rd thing turned into a kind of quest which is going to require its own blog entry. When I got back on board there were 298 messages awaiting me in one of my mailboxes, and 342 in the other, and some of them were replies to mails I've been sending out about The Quest.
If you're a post-war baby boomer you'll be interested, if you're not you'll be surprised at just how dumb some people think you are.
More later.
It seemed like the whole time that I was offline there was just an endless stream of blogworthy incidents happening. I guess that's what goes on when you're not online. Stuff happens. Certainly it seemed like at least twice a day something would happen which would make me think "Must blog this... Gah!!"
One thing I didn't expect to be blogging about was picking up a book called '40 years of NME charts' a few months ago.
Doesn't sound very promising, does it? Go ahead, you can say it, even now as I type this it sounds like the prologue to something I wouldn't bother to read. A blog about a book. Worse, a blog about a list of Hit Parades masquerading as a book. I think I'll stop right now.
Only I haven't. Nope. Still here.
For those not in the know, the New Musical Express was the first UK publication to feature the recorded music charts. Yup. Charts based upon the number of gramophone records sold in the previous week. Hard to imagine it was such a novel idea, eh? The fact is that until rock'n'roll and skiffle no one was particularly interested in what was selling, but once someone turned the electricity on - as another blogger somewhere once put it - there was no stopping us. Admittedly I was just a kid, but rock'n'roll was definitely different even to those of us still in short trousers, and (Much to my dad's chagrin), as soon as I realised that there were charts with the names of rock'n'roll and skiffle stuff in them, I wanted to see them. It was probably the only time dad wished that I hadn't learnt to read so early.
To my mother the idea that I might start school without being able to read was complete anathema, and with the aid of Korky the Kat, Little Plum (Your Redskin chum), and Desperate Dan in the Dandy and the Beano I started to learn to read. Dad never actively participated in 'putting the shoes on Willy', that I can remember, but he certainly approved to the point of not playing any of his 78s while I was learning. Little did he know that it was shortly to start costing him something in the region of 1/- a week.
The first thing I noticed as I perused the book for the first time, was that there was no rock'n'roll in the earliest charts, but since at that point I wasn't long seperated from my mother's womb I guess this was to be expected. The next thing I noticed was the mistakes. When you publish a weekly chart you can get away with the occasional error, but when they're later displayed in sequential order it becomes kinda easy to notice when a record vanishes from the charts for a week, only to come back the following week with a 'Last week's position' displayed alongside it. The 3rd thing I noticed was that you don't hear this music on the radio any more.
That 3rd thing turned into a kind of quest which is going to require its own blog entry. When I got back on board there were 298 messages awaiting me in one of my mailboxes, and 342 in the other, and some of them were replies to mails I've been sending out about The Quest.
If you're a post-war baby boomer you'll be interested, if you're not you'll be surprised at just how dumb some people think you are.
More later.
WIDGETIZE