The Mountain, 103.7

So,  Friday amid all the unrelenting dire news re. the buildup to yet another war came some local news that, while trivial in comparison, actually has impact on my daily life: our favorite local radio station is shutting down, effective immediately. 'The Mountain' (FM 103.7) played a good mix of rock classics and more recent music in the same mode. Too many commercials at times, but a good station: one we found soon after our arrival out here (in September 1997: sixteen years ago as of about this time). Lately it's lost ground to 96.5 ('Jack FM'), supplemented by 102.5 (whose motto isn't, but ought to be, 'all Led Zeppelin, all the time') and 95.7 (the best of all the local oldies stations).* But for all that The Mountain has stayed as the first preset button on our radio ever since;** we even have one of the 'unplugged' albums they put out.*** I'll miss it, all the more since what's replacing it -- billed as music for women -- turns out to be synthesized voice songs of the sort I associate with ads for Barbie movies.

According to the announcement The Mountain will carry on online as a streaming radio station. I'm not much on the streaming, but will have to give it a try. I fear it'll be like the Seattle P-I, the better of the two local papers, once a major print paper but since imploded to just a website. Alas.


Here's the announcement (thanks to Janice for sharing the news), followed by a link to the streaming site.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2013/08/30/the-mountain-103-7-goes-off-air-after-22-years/

http://www.themountainseattle.com/

--JDR.

P.S.: It occurred to me that non-Seattleites might not get the station's name: in these parts, any time you refer to THE mountain, it means Mount Rainier, which dominates the landscape for miles and miles and miles. 

*until recently this list of favorite stations wd have included 101.5, but they changed format recently, away from rock and into recent very light pop (pseudo disco) and lost me.

**in the cars, that is; inside they're all set to NPR.

***esp. for the songs "Spooky" as covered by Joan Osbourne and "Little Heaven" by Cesar Rosas (never heard of the song or group before getting the cd, making this quite the discovery); the accoustic cover of "Overkill" by Colin Hay and Shawn Mullins' "Lullabye" also keep us coming back to this one from time to time.

Lynyrd Skynyrd and the ship of Theseus

So, I was surprised to see an advertisement on the big flashing billboard next to the ShoWare center in downtown Kent that Lynyrd Skynyrd are performing there on Sept. 27th. I'm old enough to remember the night their plane crashed (we were spending hours in a bus on a band trip, as I recall) back in '77, killing lead singer Ronnie Van Zant and putting an end to the group (several of whom were badly injured and years in healing). They were already fading as a group at the time, but the tragedy bestowed a 'legendary' status on them, as it so often does (cf. Stevie Ray Vaughn, Jim Croce, et al.)

I knew about the Rossington-Collins band the survivors had briefly formed (circa '79-80), which was pleasant enough but not memorable: their instrumental version of "Freebird", for example, felt meandering and unfocused. It turned out, as is so often the case, that the singer/songwriter lead vocalist is the one member a band can't do without.* And I was vaguely aware that more recently some (not all) of the survivors had re-formed years later for some special event, with Van Zant's little brother standing in as their vocalist. But I guess I hadn't realized they'd stayed together after the tribute was over.** A little checking online revealed that of the six band members who'd been alive after the crash (guitarists Rossington, Collins, and King; pianist extraordinaire Powell, drummer Pyle, and bassist Wilkeson), only three are living now (it has been thirty-five years ago, after all, and the southern rock lifestyle does not encourage longevity): Rossington, King, and Pyle. And of those three, only one is still in the group (Rossington).

Which raises the question: is a band with only one original member still the same band? At what point does it become "those people touring the local casinos as 'Lynyrd Skynyrd' " rather than the real thing?*** How big a role does continuity play (e.g., the Rolling Stones only has three of its original members; the newly reformed Beach Boys only two, Pink Floyd only one****)?

It turns out there's a classical precedent for this, the so-called paradox of 'the Ship of Theseus', which goes something like this:

Plutarch writes that even in his day (1st century AD) the Athenians still had on display the original ship Theseus used (presumably in his famous voyage to and from Crete some twelve hundred years before, the one that ended badly when he forgot to swap-out his black sails). But it'd needed maintenance over the centuries, with rotting timbers replaced by new ones as needed, until there was actually no piece left of the original ship. The question: is it still the same ship, or not?

In the philosophical conundrum, it depends on whether you value the whole or the parts, the ideal or the material, the continuity or a particular moment in time (and, if so, which).

In the case of the band, I think the announcement that Lynyrd Skynyrd is scheduled to play the Republican national convention later this month answers that question: I don't think the band that wrote and recorded "Things Going On", not to mention the denunciation of Wallace and Nixon in "Sweet Home Alabama", their most famous song, wd be a good fit for the gathering in Tampa. Which leads me to think, in this case at least, the answer is No: Not the Same.

--John R.

P.S.: Thanks to my sister, who gave me a copy of Skynyrd's SECOND HELPING just before I moved to Fayetteville, telling me it was so I'd listen to something else besides the music I usually listened to (Captain & Tennille, the Beatles). I still have that album, and still listen to it once in a while (though more often to the version on Itunes). At Fayetteville I added SILVER AND GOLD (which I think had been recommended by my friend Franklin; I know I got it at the Record Exchange, where he was working at the time) and a cassette of their first album (which also, amazingly enough, still plays just fine, over thirty years later). Music and Memories: how well they go together.

* cd. INXS for a more recent example.

**which apparently violated an agreement they'd all made with the widows of two members killed in the crash, that the survivors wdn't use, and thus cheapen, the name 'Lynyrd Skynyrd'.

***a question people used to ask about Jefferson Starship, with its endless shifting line-up.

****although in the later two cases one of the 'replacements' has been with the group since very early on (mid-to-late sixties)

6339 songs

So, a few months back* I started listening to the songs on my iPod -- ALL the songs on my iPod -- in alphabetical order. My thinking was that there's a lot of great music there I never listen to because I don't think about it. It's the problem of too many choices: out of over six thousand songs, which ones do I want to hear at any given time? I can always think of a good starting point, but where to go from there? Janice's solution, and it's a good one, is to hit shuffle and enjoy a mix of what the iPod gives her. But that ironically works better with her mini-iPod than with our old 80-gig iPod: too many recorded books on the latter introduce a jarring note, as one song is followed by a randomly-excerted bit of text (some of which inconveniently run over an hour in length), followed by another song; it breaks up the background-music element of my listen-while-you-work routine.

So, I decided to listen to everything, going under the "Songs" option and starting with #1 ("A" by the Bare Naked Ladies) and ending yesterday, early evening, with #6339 ("10538 Overture" by E.L.O.) -- iPod's alphabetization first running through the alphabet (the vast bulk of the songs, ending in #6129 (Herb Albert's "Zorba the Greek"), then things in foreign scripts --I have a fair number of pieces from anime soundtracks with unrecognizable (to me) titles in kanji. Then last of all came numbers, which included not just songs like "867-5309 but also radio station dial numbers (for use in playing it in the car) and audio recordings I'd made (titled by date) at the 2004 Marquette Blackwelder conference and again at another 2007 Tolkien event.

Of course, I didn't feel obliged to listen literally to 6,339 tracks. Some songs are on there multiple times -- which is fine, when listening to them by album, but can be a bit much when listening to them alphabetically, song by song. I think I really did listen to "Hey Jude" five times in a row, but then I really like Hey Jude (na-na-na-naah), while I think I skipped over some of the multiple versions of "If I Had a Million Dollars", good though that song is.

My conclusion? I have a lot of good music on this old iPod. Not surprisingly, there's a lot of Beatles, and McCartney, but surprisingly there's more Warren Zevon and Bare Naked Ladies than I'd expected and somewhat less Alan Parsons Project or Tears for Fears (given that I have all the latter two's albums). Also, there can't possibly be as many tracks for "Pirates of Penzance" and "Les Miserables" as there seemed to be. There just can't.

Also, that I was wise when starting to build my iTunes account all over again on the new laptop after the old laptop's catastrophic failure a few years back, in that now instead of adding a whole album I only add the songs I like and want to listen to from that album -- which may be the whole thing, or may be a single song.

What's next? I think it's time to dip back into my .45s again when I'm at home and downstairs, though for working-by music they require I be working on a project that benefits by frequent interruption -- which is a rare sort of project indeed. More likely I'll devote worktime music to the albums rather than the singles, many of which I never did replace with cds and most of which still play just fine.

And for the iPod, I'll probably do some shuffle within the songs by a specific artist.

And my next music purchase? That'll probably be the new George Harrison album, which I just found out about a few days ago.

Good listening, all.

--John R

*unfortunately, I didn't make any note of the time.