I flew straight to Los Angeles, California after I got out the Navy, Redondo Beach actually.  When I got there, I was staying with my brother and two other guys from my hometown.  It was a day I’ll never forget because less than 2 hours after my friend, Django picked me up from LAX, we went to visit a girl I’d known since middle school who put 2 hits of blotter acid on my tongue and we partied like it was a few days after the L.A. Riots of 1992 because it was a few days after the L.A. Riots of 1992.  We lived just a block and a half away from Torrance Beach by Miramar Park on Palos Verdes Boulevard and it was one of the best trips I’ve ever had.  My musical tastes were already beginning to change after my brother had turned me on to a few different things.  We had a great stereo with speakers mounted closer to the ceiling.  We trekked the beach for hours, smoking weed and talking.  I was tripping bean, and the sun had already been down a few hours by this time.  I had just peaked in my acid trip and was starting to mellow out after my brother gave me a long talk how L.A. was a city where anyone could be anything they wanted to be, anyone they wanted to be if they just made the commitment.  We’re walking along the shore and the waves that came crashing down were mesmerizing until this little baby seal walked right up to me and started barking at me.  At first I thought I was just tripping, and my brother (whom was totally sober) let me know, “nope, that’s a fucking seal.  Wow.”  We got back home, and listened to Philip Glass, Music for the Screens, which I will post later.  Then as he was winding down, my brother put a CD by Maurice Jarre into the stereo that blew my mind like no other.  It really knocked me for a loop.  For those of you who don’t know, Maurice Jarre is a composer who has done music for films for a long time, and is best known for the soundtracks to the classic films such as Doctor Zhivago, starring Omar Sharif, and Lawrence of Arabia, starring Peter O’Toole, as well as contemporary classics such as Witness, starring Harrison Ford,   Maurice Jarre’s original motion picture soundtrack to director Adrian Lyne’s (Fatal Attraction) 1990 film, Jacob’s Ladder, starring Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Peña, and Danny Aielio.   Quite frankly, Jacob’s Ladder was better than every other film that Adrian Lyne’s best film.  But I’ll let you decide for yourself.  I was coming down from a heavy trip, listen to this then tell me if there was a part that would’ve woken you up from a come-down slumber after a heavy acid trip?

Jacob’s Ladder is one of my all time favorite films, a true masterpiece of dramatic horror mystery.  I was more than a little disappointed that the 21st Century remake monster of our current Hollywood community wasted their time remaking rather than taking a risk on buying a new intellectual property.  But you can purchase Jacob’s Ladder on DVD at Amazon.  It’s also currently available streaming on Amazon Prime if you happen to have Amazon Prime.  But this post was so I could share the Jacob’s Ladder original motion picture soundtrack with you, which you can also find on Amazon as well.

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Interesting little factoid about yours truly, I’ve purchased more than a few soundtracks before I’d even seen the movie.  As I stated already in the previous post, I’m a big fan of dramatic music.  Which is why I have so many motion picture soundtracks in my CD collection.  Before I joined the Navy, I was into a lot of punk rock bands like Black Flag, The Circle Jerks, and Naked Raygun, or dark industrial electronica like Ministry or Skinny Puppy.  My brother told me about an album by Peter Gabriel, called Passion, which was the original motion picture soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ, a film by Martin Scorsese.  He was living in Los Angeles while I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia.  So naturally I ran right out to the local shopping mall and purchased the cassette tape right away.  Passion, by Peter Gabriel, whom I was not the biggest fan of at the time by the way, profoundly changed my musical tastes immediately and forevermore.   My first foreign country that I ever got to visit was Bahrain, and I was there for more than 2 weeks before I even saw my ship.  Uncle Sam put me up in a د.ب500BD per night Sheraton Hotel, which comes out to about $1,375 per night, of which I was in my own room for 10 days before they made me stay at the ASU (American Support Unit), but I digress…  I liked the music, because it was unlike anything I had ever heard before, sounding so primitively mysterious in its different tones and scales that people in that portion of the globe played.  However, I had only really heard it in the taxi cabs when I explored the city of Manama.  I ended up surprised when I went shopping and ended up buying all these bootlegs that supplied me with the entire Red Hot Chili Peppers discography on Thames.  Only for me to find out that Mother’s Milk (which was new at the time) and Uplift Mofo Party Plan were thus far the only halfway decent things they had recorded as of yet.  I was jet-lagged, so I would wake up at 0400 and would hear the call to prayer faintly over the city loudspeakers from behind my hotel window overlooking the dusty island city off the coast of Saudi Arabia.  To me, it was all so filled with an ominous mystique that I found more intriguing than foreboding.  But I was still musically immature at the time and hadn’t quite found that which would change my worldview yet.  After listening to this soundtrack, I listened to it exclusively on my Walkman for more than a month.  At first, I wasn’t at all interested in seeing The Last Temptation of Christ, being that at the time the last thing I wanted to see or hear anything about was Jesus.  Having grown up in Catholicism and Christianity, not to mention that once you get into the military you will be exposed to all sorts of Christian influence peddlers seeking to take advantage of ungrounded or spiritually ambivalent youngsters away from home for the first time, I simply wasn’t interested in such a film.  But once my brother, whom has always been a strong influence on me, told me that the Christians absolutely hated that film, I hopped on a bus and transferred to another bus to find a video store to rent that film and made my entire department watch the New York accented apostles and Jesus in a show that folks thought was sacrilegiously blasphemous.  However, I quite found Nikos Kazantzakis’ interpretation of Christ to be more than a little influential for me.  I believe that concept far more than I do just about anything some reprobate faith peddling huckster tries selling it.  At any rate, I hope you enjoy this playlist.  Thus far, this is the first actual “playlist” I’ve shared.  This is by far the best work that Peter Gabriel has done to this very day, and I would also highly recommend picking up this soundtrack,  Peter Gabriel’s Passion Soundtrack on Amazon.

If you enjoyed that, and have a deeper curiosity for learning more about his influence and what later became known as “world beat”, you might want to check out PASSION SOURCES, released by Real World.

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

Since picking up and moving to Japan to help Mrs S take care of a dying mother with ALS, numerous people keep asking me about life in Japan.  It’s remarkably different in a lot of ways, but one thing that isn’t different is that good music can be found anywhere in the world.  I’ve been with my wife for over 16 years, and let me tell you something.  For most of us, music is usually one of the first things people initially bond on when making new friends and acquaintances.  I’m sure you all know that when you meet or start dating someone new, most of us put our best foot forward.  Remember the good old days of the “mix tape” being the thing that you would put your time and effort into in hopes of wooing a woman or a man?  Perhaps you don’t, maybe I’m giving away my age even asking that question.  Let me be real with you for a moment, and I know that I’m probably going to get a few boos from the peanut gallery. But there is an extraordinary amount of shitty music out there, especially over here in Japan.

Don’t get me wrong, I love it here, surely I do.  But there’s more noise pollution that you could ever believe and the musical tastes of the majority of the public is rooted in absolute garbage like AKB48.  Now I’m not trying to be a total dick, but a little bit.  It’s one bad pop band after another pop group after another boy band after another terrible soloist.  I would even go so far as to come right out and state clearly that most of what I hear when I go to the local grocery store or department store or electronics store is nothing short of being worthy of being labeled as straight up noise pollution.  I know there’s plenty of Puffy Amiyumi fans out there in the USA who might disagree with what I’m saying here.  But I’m not necessarily talking about them.  I actually enjoy some of their cuts, not many but some.

However, let me hip you to someone that I do actually like.  Shiina Ringo, 椎名林檎, is a pop-rock artist of Japan that I happen to really enjoy, mainly because she has a way of surrounding herself with strong musicians and producers.  She puts on a great show, however, she’s not exactly what you might label as a big star.  She’s well known, but like I said, people mostly tend to listen to garbage that gets crammed down their throats by the corporate overlords.  When I first my Mrs S, she really did put her best foot forward.  It wasn’t this, in fact we kinda discovered Shiina Ringo (椎名林檎) together.  But she turned me on to a lot of music from the 1970s Japanese music scene, which also goes along with my other hypothesis about the true pinnacle of contemporary music was in the 1970s.  I don’t care if it’s rock, pop, R&B, country, jazz, Latin, or Japanese music, the 1970s was this time of musical evolution that was occurring before corporate culture turned it to shit, but I digress…

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As an individual who has been playing music my entire life, I’m always on the lookout for something that either touches me or makes me want to move.  I’m a bit of a music snob, kind of a dick about it too.  Although I happen to be married to somebody who doesn’t dance at all, I absolutely LOVE to dance. I’m always dancing, in fact.  I’m the weirdo who dances up and down the aisles at just about every local grocery store I’ve ever set foot in, including here in Japan where it isn’t exactly looked at as something any normal individual might be caught dead doing around here.  But I digress…  At any rate, I drove for Uber & Lyft for about 4 years, and the one thing I was always well reviewed for was my musical selection.  At first I only used my iPod until the doohickey that plugs into the phone-jack broke inside it, losing me my own personal playlist access. Fortunately for me and all my passengers, Uber added Pandora access to the app.  As you may recall from my previous musical post, I’m a big fan of the JB’s.  But here’s the most amazing thing about Pandora, which is also why it is my go to app for listening to music.  I don’t have to work so hard to find some true gems when I use Pandora, as opposed to Spotify, of which I am most certainly not a fan.  I have found some of the absolute most fantastic musicians on Pandora that I might not have found on my own, like this one that I found on my “The JBs radio” station,  Lack of Afro.  A multi-instrumentalist and producer by the name of Adam Gibbons from Exeter, England, going by the performance name of Lack of Afro has captured the full attention and respect of this music snob.  Though it was the track, Rusty, that knocked me for a loop first, this is the track that got me jumping up to dance in my living room like I was at a club.

Lack of Afro is an absolute powerhouse of vintage soul stylings from across the pond.  However, I’ve been saying for years that this world is a ever evolving flow of patterns of energy and information, of which there are vortexes.  Wherever you go, people do music differently.  But there’s just something about musicians in England and their connection with music.  I suspect that it’s a vortex of musical evolution that comes from the fact that the U.K. is a global empire that made its way around the planet, taking on new subjects into the British Commonwealth to further evolve the culture of Great Britain.  This is just my own hypothesis, but one I’ll stick to forever.

Lack of Afro put out his first 12″ single called Wait a Minute back in 2006, followed up by a first album in 2007 (Press On), then My Groove Your Move (2009), This Time (2011), Music For Adverts (2014), all released by Freestyle Records.  Hello Baby (2016), Hello Baby – The Instrumentals (2016), and Jack of All Trades (2018), published by LOA Records.

Any real Soul fan knows about the JB’s and that the JB’s were truly the heart and soul of the Godfather of Soul. But it was Bobby Byrd who was the one who discovered James Brown. This is one of my favorite songs of all time, one of which more than a few rappers ripped off. I never get tired of jamming it!

These guys were before anyone had ever come up with the name for what is considered and now named as the genre of funk. I have been listening to The JB’s station on my Pandora almost exclusively for the past 3 months. I just wanted to share it with y’all, for those of you who get bored of the typical standard Top 40 bullshit that anyone who walks into a retail clothing store hears.

Copyright Disclaimer – Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

Prince was my first icon when I was in middle school back in 1983. How in the entire actual sequence of the contemporary historical timeline of actual fucks did I not hear this amazing cut back then??

This would have changed my entire life and my whole musical worldview altogether, swear to God it absolutely would’ve. It would have deterred me from all that heavy metal stuff, because the piano was my first instrument. I haven’t really talked much about this in any of these blog posts that I’d been writing all this time. When I was 4 years old, my parents used to take me and my brother to our Grandparents’ house every Sunday after church. My Grandfather had a nice Cable upright piano that I would plunk around on and they took me to see this psychopathic little globe of a man with a bad toupee and a harsh demeanor that always gave me the good sense that he didn’t like children very much. But although I saw him do some pretty frightening shit to some of the other kids, he was halfway decent to me. Scary AF, but not so bad because according to him, I was a natural. At least that’s what she used to brag to her friends and kinda Mom me with over and over later on in life. But perhaps he was right, because by the time I was 7 years old I had already started taking up the violin. I like the violin, but you know, violin boy doesn’t get the girl. So naturally, by the time I was 13 I had begun teaching myself the guitar. I’m no John McLaughlin or Michael Hedges, but I play it and I subsequently taught myself how to play the bass guitar, the mandolin, the ukulele, and once upon a time I could fake it well enough on a sitar I used to have before I had to sell it to pay a bill once. But Prince was my first icon, and when I say icon, I even picked up a habit of acting a little freaky too. I had my freak flag flyin’ even though it wasn’t a freak flag to me, it was just the 80s, whaddaya want from me, huh? When I heard this one just about a week or so ago, I about lost my shit. I guess we only get what the companies want you to hear. I loved Purple Rain, had it playing ever night on my auto-reverse cassette deck where I could sleep to it every night. I used to alternate between Prince’s Purple Rain cassette or Morris Day and The Time’s Ice Cream Castles cassette, which perhaps might account for my difficulty falling asleep at nights sometimes. It’s hard to sleep to music you could totally get up and dance to, kinda like if I were to attempt sleeping to the JB’s today.

Copyright Disclaimer – Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

MORE TO COME…