Joe Muscara

Once again David, it was my pleasure and honor to be a part of this. Thanks for having me! The Heathens FB group seem to be enjoying the episode as well.

Correction, that Midnight Special version rocks, the studio version and some other live versions are pretty cool but that MS version has a bit more drive, probably because of the slightly faster tempo.

Being of the correct age, I'm sure I've heard "Ride Like the Wind" before, but since "Sailing" and "Arthur's Theme" are those milquetoast-y ballads and I heard those all the time instead, I was not a fan. But RLTW rocks. I could easily put that one in heavy rotation and skip the others. BTW the videos for the other two feature the same keyboards, so that's cool at least.

Just kidding, sort of. I do hate that, yet I appreciate when the band mates really want you to play something on keys and aren’t just ignoring you. But sometimes I have no ideas for keys for the tune. Can’t I just go get a beer and come back for the next song?

Quit.

I get that from this forum and The Keyboard Chronicles podcast (run by our own @Dr Nursers and I’ve been lucky enough to be a guest host twice now) which introduced me to Lacey Doley many episodes ago, among many others. I kind of think of it as a substitute for Keyboard Mag, where there would be a page or feature on an artist I had never heard of, or someone I had and couldn’t wait to dig into. The podcast even has its own section of the forum. If you listen to podcasts (or even if you don’t), I think many of you would dig it. In fact, the latest guest I was lucky enough to co-interview is the keyboard player for a band I first heard about from a thread here on KC, and is now one of my wife’s and my favorite bands. As far as LD, I generally dig him. Sometimes I don’t love when he’s basically just doing a guitar thing on keys, but yeah there’s a bit of showmanship there and it gets a crowd going. I’m always checking out his latest videos. Some of them get played by me multiple times.

Rockets’ Kevin Porter Jr. Charged with Assault, Strangulation (note that a later article I saw says she has a fractured vertebrae in her neck!) Sigh. We had thought he was doing better. I’m seeing a lot of articles saying the Rockets should have seen the red flags, but what I saw was a guy who seemed to be doing better on the court and perhaps in the locker room. John Lucas, who is huge on helping players with issues, was an assistant and it was obvious he was working with KPJ, keeping him cool and focused. But a coach can’t be everywhere in a player’s life and obviously this is too far. The kid needs serious help and I hope he gets it, and I hope the woman gets herself in a better situation too.

I'd check out he web site of a local radio station. Start with WKRP.com.

That's nice when it works that way. I can think of lots of instances when it doesn't, like when you're starting out, or you're new in town, or the musician is new to town, or when you're looking for a specific skill and no one you know happens to play like that, or someone you've not heard of approaches you to join them, and probably others. I could just say no to all of these but I at least give them the benefit of the doubt and look them up before deciding. Svengling isn't just to look up manuals and instructions.

Oh, that doesn’t relieve my GAS at all. When I was a kid, my dad worked at a place called Harrison Electronics and they sold tons of cool stuff that was out of my reach, like oscilloscopes, ham radios, multimeters (actually I did end up with one of those, I might still even have it but it may no longer work), and they even considered selling this tall box with a teletype next to it that you could play games on like Lunar Lander and chess. Not on a screen, but on a dot matrix printer. They may have called it a “computer” or maybe it was an Altair but I don’t remember. Looking back, I’m almost surprised I became an ME instead of an EE, but my interests shifted as I got older. I still have some geekery for electronic gear of all types.

Whoa - that's the last player I'd expect to see using a single brace x-stand. Just the wobbles it has are scaring me, and having seen the energy he puts in other performances, I think it's way under-spec for him.

I'm trying not to get GAS over that bench and all the stuff on it…

My wife and I missed the game because we were at a movie, but how did UH lose to Rice? They even tied it up by scoring 21 in the fourth but finally lost in 2OT because Rice made a 2 point conversion and UH didn’t. This their first year in the Big 12 and they’re not looking terrific. They barely won against UTSA last week. (In case you’re wondering, I’m Terps all the way but the Coogs are the second team I care about. My wife got her undergrad there and was in the marching band, and I got my master’s there.)

I’ve had so many times in my old band where I barely had any info on the guy, just a first name and phone number, I would have loved to have been able to look up something just to get an idea of who they were before having them over my house where we practiced. They were all fine, but one day I realized it was weird to not know about these various people. Nowadays I can at least look up a little about the person or even the band I might be considering before spending any time even contacting them or learning their music. I’ve literally found YT videos of bands and after listening thought, “never mind!” and moved on.

For me, it depends on the day. Sometimes I listen to Jarrett and I'm blown away. Other times, I can only hear the vocalizing. I think they leave it in as sort of a trademark. Overall, I wish they didn't and I'd rather have less of it. I used to think I didn't like the Rhodes sound, generally. But it turns out I don't like the way some people effect it. It's probably when they heavily stereo ping-pong it that bugs me the most. OTOH, the tone Billy Preston had on that sparkletop model in Get Back/Let It Be (the album)? I could play that all day and night. 💖

This thread made me play Boston and Don’t Look Back on my run yesterday. I don’t know why I often forget about this band. I loved the first three albums when they came out and I still do. Listening to them, I thought, “if I could be somebody else, Tom Scholz might be who I’d be.” I mean, musically, he did such amazing work like all the instrumental tracks, but he’s also a tech genius building stuff like the Rockman (was that the first tube amp emulator?) and all his studio gear and set up. And it all comes out as great rock and roll.

Rappers who start a tune with, “uh… uh… yeah” That just seems lazy and now trite to me. Speaking of “uh,” I know some guys on a podcast who, when listening to jazz, will go, “uh!” when they hear something cool in a tune. Remember earlier in the thread when I mentioned sirens? I have tickets to see Lakecia Benjamin on Friday, and pulled up her album. I had my phone turned up previously from something else, and first sound on the first track was… a siren. 😡 Now, I know the song is political and has a reason for it just from the title, but I was like, “really? I know I just said I don’t like that, but really? Now?” At least I wasn’t driving.

While "quiet quitting" is a new term, it's really nothing new… [second clip ironically NSFW]

I enjoy some of the latest Marvel movies, but the trailers I get before those are annoying. BOOM … BOOM … BOOM … BOOM … and what's even worse is when it's quiet before the movie (or after it) and I can hear the trailers BOOMing in a nearby theater.

Now that I recognize it, I’m starting to get tired of the bass drop. I don’t think it’s limited to songs, isn’t it in almost every movie trailer too?

Sirens, especially while I am driving.

And what do they breathe? Clearly there's no atmosphere there on the flat earth.

I leave them on, but I tend to leave labels, tags, and the plastic on the screens on all the time if they don’t interfere with normal use. It drives my wife crazy. 🤪😁🙃

This thread title keeps getting to me. Like anything that is under a copyright, you never owned a movie (that you didn't make yourself), you owned access to a copy of it. "Who cares?" you say. "We all know what @Anderton meant." But it means is that the owners of the movies can do what they want with it. They can ship it on streaming, DVD, Blu-Ray, DVD, Laserdisc, Beta, VHS, whatever. They can show it once and never again. Or, never show it at all. Which reminds me of a South Park episode where they were jabbing Lucas and Spielberg for changing their classic movies. At then end, Kyle or Stan made a speech about how they couldn't change the movies, "they're ours!" he insisted. I looked at my wife and said, "he's wrong. Once we saw it in theaters, we paid for our ticket, got our showing, and that's it. What the creators do with it after that is completely up to them. We may not like it, but it's not up to us." And as far as "cultural history," again, I get it, but what we're talking about here is a blip in the history of humanity and even less if you include prehistory. It sucks if a solar flare would wipe out all of it, but how much history has been lost that we'll never know? One time, my godfather, who was best friends with my grandfather, gave me a picture of the two of them, with another woman in the photo. I asked him who the woman was, and he had no idea. Think about that. We take all these photos for "memories" but how many photos can you go through and have no idea who is in them or what they are of? I have a ton of my dad's old photos from when he was a Marine. I have no idea who is in them besides sometimes him (he did apparently take a selfie!) nor what the guys were doing nor where. That all may make me sound pretty negative or pessimistic, but I'm not. Quite the opposite. I'm an advocate of enjoying the moment. Appreciate what you have. It could be all gone tomorrow. Or, the format might change and we'll have to adapt to that one. Whatever. It's fine.

Nope, not a peep.