The Dreaded Resealable Vinyl Sleeves

If you’ve done any record shopping at all, you’ve surely noticed that most used records are protected by a transparent record sleeve. Perhaps not the dozens of ring-worn copies of B.J. Thomas, Barbara Streisand and Barry Manilow, but any record worth more than $10 is likely covered in some fashion (and please note that I’m not knocking any of those artists – it’s just that their records are, well…plentiful).

In most stores, records are stored in a certain way:

1)      The records themselves are front-facing for ease of flipping.

2)      They are housed in plastic outer sleeves whose open ends are pointed towards the album cover openings (apparently called a “cover mouth.” I just learned something!).

3)      The inner sleeves that house the record itself are also pointed toward the cover mouth, allowing would-be buyers to extract the vinyl record without any unnecessary steps.

Some albums don’t play nice with this storage – Elton John’s Honky Chateau comes to mind – but for most part, this type of format works well, and as a guy who buys a fair number of records each year, I’ve grown accustomed to this protocol.

But more and more lately, I’ve had the misfortune of perusing used records that are housed in resealable sleeves, the kind that fold over and adhere like a Post-It note, leaving the album cover completely encased – even the opening that houses the inner sleeve and record. This obviously makes checking the record quality tedious, because I have to peel back the sticky fold of the outer sleeve to extract the record, and if I’m thumbing through a couple hundred items, it makes for a cumbersome visit and an unhappy camper.

Some stores go to even greater lengths to spoil my record-buying outing, turning a potential customer into a sworn enemy. Outside of Phoenix, one particular establishment (who shall remain nameless) turns a record quality check into about a minute-long ordeal on the front end, and then another minute-long ordeal on the back end. To wit:

1)      The records are stored in resealable sleeves. My happy disposition is already marred.

2)      These resealable sleeves are pointed north so that the “cover mouth” isn’t exposed even after opening the outer sleeve. Because of this, the album cover has to be completely extracted from the outer sleeve.  Now I’m starting to mutter a few obscenities.

3)      This store takes things a step further: the inner sleeve is also pointing north, meaning I can’t take out the vinyl without first slipping the entire inner sleeve out of the record cover. By this point I’m giving the stink eye to the poor clerk at the cash register, and she probably has nothing to do with this madness!

4)      Once the record is freed from this insanity, I hold it between my hands and tilt it from side to side. And wouldn’t you know it? This particular copy of Working Class Dog by Rick Springfield is marked up beyond any reasonable collector’s threshold, and by this point I’m fuming, because…

5)      I now have to reverse the process to put the album back the way I found it!

I certainly wasn’t going to go through this procedure again and again. I walked out empty-handed and spent my money elsewhere.

I’ve been told by my friend and podcast partner Chris that if a store is going to use resealable sleeves, an accurate grade of the record should be marked on a sticker so that the buyer knows what he or she is getting. But even then I’m skeptical, because I want to see what I’m buying, and not every grading system is consistent.

Sure, if you own a record store and have a mint copy of Prince’s Black Album, go ahead – put it inside a resealable sleeve. In fact, put it in a safe and just display a photo of the record for interested parties! But for most merchandise in the $10 to $250 range, please do us all a favor and stick to the protocols that make record-buying a joyful experience.

Radical Amazement OR Living Every Day as if it's Your First

You may have heard of Suleika Jaouad, a musician and best-selling author of Between Two Kingdom’s, but she might be even better known as the wife of fellow musician John Baptiste. That’s how I discovered her. Together they were featured in the 2023 documentary, American Symphony, which focuses on Baptiste’s musical career as well as his wife’s struggles with leukemia.

Jaouad has a new book called The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life, which includes contributions from several musicians, writers, activists and actors. I haven’t yet read the book, but I was taken with something that Jaouad said recently on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert as part of her promotional tour. After being diagnosed with her third bout of leukemia last year, her doctor advised her to live every day as if it were her last, a common refrain when someone is faced with a terrible illness.

The trouble, Jaouad claims, is that it’s terrible advice.

I encourage you to watch the clip, but Jaouad explains, “It is exhausting to try to make every family dinner as meaningful as possible and to carpe diem the crap out of every moment.”

So what’s a better way to look at life when faced with a deadly illness, or a way to look at life in general?

She goes on, “Instead I’ve had to shift to a gentler mindset, and I am trying to live every day as if it’s my first. To wake up with that sense of pure uninhibited creative freedom, that sense of wonder and curiosity that a little kid might.”

We would all do well to apply Jaouad’s advice, and we certainly needn’t be faced with cancer to do so.

By some stroke of luck, a few days before seeing the above video clip, I attended a lecture at Elmhurst University, during which Rabbi Steven Bob celebrated the life and teachings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a prominent theologian and author in the 20th century. In Heschel’s 1951 book, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion, he discusses a concept that aligns very much with Jaouad’s: radical amazement. It’s this concept that Rabbi Bob highlighted in his lecture.  

Heschel writes, “Human beings must stand in radical amazement that they exist at all…to be so in awe of every aspect of the world and its creator that one cannot help but do one’s part to make it the best it can be.”

Upon learning Heschel’s phrase and – just a few days later – having it reinforced by Jaouad (in spirit, if not in exact words), this idea of radical amazement has been foremost on my mind. I’ve caught myself several times a day actively being in awe of something that might otherwise be categorized as mundane. A flower. The sky. My wife’s smile. A warm bed. A heartfelt laugh. A hardy meal. My body’s movements. There is no shortage of things to be inspired by, and tapping into the beauty of the mundane is a large part of what attracted me to Judaism in the first place, as it’s largely a religion of elevating what might be considered normal everyday activities into something more, something spiritual, something meaningful.

Of course, one doesn’t have to be Jewish or Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or anything else to consider the philosophy of radical amazement. One just needs to be human. There are loads of wonderful articles and videos online to spur you on your journey to embracing the wonder of life. I’m going to dig deeper into this concept, and I suspect that starting with the books of Heschel and Jaouad might be great places to start. If you find another great source, let me know. Good luck with your journey.

Ringo Starr's Signature Drum Fill Returns!

Many years ago, I wrote about what I call Ringo Starr’s signature drum fill, one that he utilized extensively in 1968 and 1969.  There are slight variations, but here’s the basic fill.

Listen to an example.

Pretty simple, but effective, and Ringo was all over this fill in the late Beatles’ period, as illustrated in the following medley taken from their final three albums plus the single “Hey Jude.” 

After I wrote about this, I started noticing this fill everywhere, and I’ve been logging each example in a Word file for years. What inspired me to address this subject again was a performance just a few weeks ago by Elton John and Brandi Carlile on Saturday Night Live. During their song, “Who Believes in Angels,” the drummer played the same lick, and my ears immediately pricked up. It’s just one of those go-tos that drummers utilize, and the fill works especially well after a dramatic pause, such as in “Plush” by Stone Temple Pilots, “Too Much of Anything” by the Who, “Was I Out of My Head” by Fastball, and – my favorite employment of the Ringo lick, “Vampyre of Time and Memory” by Queens of the Stone Age. 

In all, I’ve logged twenty-four examples of the lick from artists other than Ringo Starr, and I’ve compiled them into a brief medley below. Two of them come from the same album – Marc Cohn’s brilliant Burning the Days – and they include some of the world’s greatest drummers, including Pete Thomas, Keith Moon, Charlie Watts and John Bonham. Drummers take note: sometimes simple is best. See if you can identify the tunes on your own, but if not, below is a list of each song. Enjoy!

Too Much of Anything – The Who
Made to Last – Semisonic
Wild Horses – The Rolling Stones
Was I Out of My Head – Fastball
Who Believes in Angels – Elton John and Brandi Carlile
There We Are – James Taylor
Someone Saved My Life Tonight – Elton John
Sign of Life – Sunshine Boys
Maybe I’m Amazed – Paul McCartney
Laura – Billy Joel
Vanishing Spies – Frank Black
I Got a Name – Jim Croce
Mission (A World Record) – Electric Light Orchestra
Can’t Stop the Music – Daryl Hall & John Oates
Providence – Marc Cohn
Too Many Knots to Untangle – Graham Parker
Daddy’s All Gone – James Taylor
Saints Preserve Us – Marc Cohn
Ready for Love – Mott the Hoople
Spyder – Imperial Drag
Thank You – Led Zeppelin
Victim of Love – The Eagles
Plush – Stone Temple Pilots
Vampyre of Time and Memory – Queens of the Stone Age

A New Song: Happy Ending

Rather than embark on another huge project this year, I’ve decided to record two new songs, fine-tune two old songs, and put them out as two releases – a single and a 3-song EP. First up is the single, Happy Ending, a blistering four-minute tirade that was written last year and primarily recorded from December 2024 through February of this year.

Unlike my several last recordings, I decided to use a drum softsynth rather than the real thing, just as I did with my earliest recordings. More and more I’ve been finding that mixing songs with live drums – especially when engineers set up twelve or more mics to capture the sound – to be a frustrating, mind-numbing process, forcing me to use samples to avoid the inevitable bleeding that occurs when dealing with so many tracks. Great mixing engineers may be able to manage all of this just fine, but I can not. My best experience mixing live drums was with my 2021 album, The Human Form Divine, when I insisted that the engineer set up as few mics as possible, mimicking the Glyn Johns technique that he used on so many great-sounding albums. This method worked great for me, and to date, Human Form is one of my best-sounding efforts.

To purchase a drum softsynth, I called up good old Ben from Sweetwater last summer and asked him to recommend one that was easy to use. He suggested EZ Drummer 3, and while there were certainly a few quirks to be overcome, ultimately I was satisfied with how the process went. As always, I eschewed any prerecorded MIDI performances and instead recorded my own part, spending hours on velocity adjustments, fills, flams and ghost notes. My son Sam offered some great feedback in this regard, directing me to the most human-sounding performance.

So, is the drum part I came up with better than a really good drummer playing live? Nope! But the mixing process was so effortless in comparison with my last project that it was worth the modest drop-off, particularly for a song that was really all about the energy rather than virtuosic performances.

Once I laid down the bass, vocal and scratch piano tracks, I asked local guitarist Brandon Schreiner if he’d be willing to help out. Brandon and I have played a few dozen times together over the years, mostly in a friend’s basement, but he has chops and musical instincts that I'd rate with the best of them (he also played on three tracks from last year’s release, Pop and Circumstance). I was elated when he agreed to play some tracks for the tune. For the guitar solo, I hummed for him an idea of how I wanted it to go, and he patiently laid down a few dozen takes before finding just the right combination. Wonderful!

I then added a bit of guitar myself, recorded piano, Wurlitzer and double vocals, and began mixing. I loved having only one tune to focus on this time around instead of a full-length album. To help with the mix, I asked a few friends to give a listen, including Sam, Brandon, Anthony Calderisi and Phil Sumida. Phil in particular offered a few hints that took the song from sounding okay to sounding really good. As always, I employed Collin Jordan of Chicago’s Boiler Room to master the project, and the results are terrific.

So step one of my 2025 recordings is complete! I hope to have my three-song EP, Esteemed Progeny, completed by the end of the summer, and I’ll then embark on a huge project that will take a couple of years to complete. At least that’s the plan for now.

Rewind: The Sunscreen Song and Teacher Hit Me With a Ruler

I talked about the Sunscreen Song on my podcast recently and thought I’d put out this blog again, originally written in 2023. The song is a fascinating bit of history, I think, with some great backstory. It’s also contains five minutes of really great advice.

The Sunscreen Song and Teacher Hit Me with a Ruler

February 02, 2023

A little insight into the mind of a music obsessive. Two examples:

1) Last week as I was flossing my teeth, I heard a man’s calm but commanding voice utter a one-word imperative sentence. Floss.

Floss. Floss. This meant something. I’d heard this man’s voice before. Deep inside my twisted brain, neurons were fired, synapses were traversed, and within a minute or two I remembered that it came from a song of sorts. A song of a speech? 

A quick Google search of “song advice speech” resulted in a link to “The Sunscreen Song,” aka “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen),” a 1998 release by film director Baz Luhrmann that became a cultural phenomenon in the U.S. The song uses an essay of a hypothetical commencement speech written by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich (widely misattributed to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.) and received nationwide radio play in 1999. It’s a terrific little oddity, and I think the advice given is an poignant and funny today as it was twenty years ago. It was great to hear again.

Thank you, twisted brain!

2) Then, this morning I read Heather Cox Richardson’s essay on the history of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a song that’s perhaps best known for its first line, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Later, while walking my dog, I found myself stepping in time to the tune, and little by little I recalled that the reason I know the song so well is due to a parody that my brother taught me when I was a young grade schooler. These lyrics are NOT something that would be tolerated at any school today, but I recall them vividly with fondness:

My eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school
We have tortured all the teachers we have broken all the rules
We have massacred the principal and barbecued the cooks
His truth is marching on

Glory, glory hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a ruler
Hid behind the door with a loaded .44
And there ain’t no teacher anymore.

Oh, how I laughed at this rendition! I particularly like the irony of barbecuing the cooks. A quick search online reveals that there are many variations of this tune, no doubt sung with glee on school playgrounds everywhere back in the day. I believe that singing it today would result in a suspension. A shame.

And there you have it. Every so often a jumbled brain will reward you with a link to the past, usually right after misplacing your car keys or stubbing your toe. Gotta get a win some of the time.