Playlist for
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
January 9, 2009

Hosted by Greg Lyon on FRIDAYS at 2-4 pm
on WPVM Asheville (103.5 FM and www.wpvm.org)

You can listen to the most recent program by going to the Archives Page at WPVM, or by accessing the MP3 stream directly here (available early Saturday morning after airing through the next Friday and then gone gone gone).

Notes:

– I would have played a whole show of Ron Asheton, featuring music from Destroy All Monsters, The New Order, New Race, and other projects, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Too damned saddening. So I played some of my favorites from the first two Stooges albums and called it a day on the tribute. I never got to see the reunited Stooges, but at least I saw Asheton play at Warsaw in Brooklyn in 2002 with Scott Morgan’s Powertrane, playing alongside guitarist Deniz Tek from Radio Birdman. That show kinda sucked–Warsaw had the worst acoustics of any venue I’ve ever been to, and I wasn’t that into Powertrane’s vibe–but the moment that Asheton stepped onto the stage, I could tell this guy was every bit the guitar monster I had hoped he was. I can’t imagine the musical universe–certainly not the one in my head–without Fun House, which is my favorite rock album of all time, hands down. Lots of great musicians spawn weak-assed mimics, epigones, pygmy shadows of the original. I never heard anybody ever say, "Hey, he’s trying to sound like Ron Asheton." That would be as banal as saying, "Hey, he’s trying to rock." Technically, I guess most people think James Williamson was a better guitarist, but I’ll take Ron Asheton’s legacy over James Williamson’s anyday. Thank you, Ron Asheton. Thank you very much for your gargantuan contribution to the music world and its blissful destruction.

– The new AFCGT (A Frames + Climax Golden Twins) 10-inch struck me as an instant classic, while the first CD they did never really hit me. I have a feeling this one is going to stay on the turntable at home for a long while. I don’t know how this amalgamation of two great bands works exactly, but I’m assuming that Min Yee of the A Frames is playing bass. It sure sounds like him. It’s all instrumental, and it’s all dope.

– I’ve been listening to a lot (well ALL) of the 1968-1972 Bob Marley, working my way through the 3 box sets, Grooving Kingston 12, Fy-ah Fy-ah, and Man to Man. I’ve never been much of a Marley fan, but that just proved that I was (and still am) a reggae moron. I was judging him by the hits from the Island period–and mainly by his frat-boy fans, to be honest. But I’ve discovered that the stuff he recorded with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry is pretty uniformly superlative. It’s so nice to discover something monumental, even if it has been staring me in the face for decades.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Playlist. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.