JCC Amph The JCC mixtape, Part II (now complete!) - full playlist link in OP

i have no idea how I'm going to be able to pick just one song this time around

 

Wow, great list. I'm really love Lyin' Eyes. But You Can Call Me Al is going to be stiff competition.

 

Summary time I suppose. I didn't do this last time.

Basically these are all songs from my youth. A handful have some strong memories but in the main are songs that make me smile and remember times when I had no real cares. I would either be on a car journey with my parents, building lego or playing board games with my friends.

Telephone Line - Vivid memories of playing Hero Quest and getting angry with my brother and him pulling out the sodding "Balrog" again.
Walk Like an Egyptian - First pop star crush with Susanna Hoffs (Michaela Strachan was the cerebral crush)
You can call me Al - First music video I really remember and Chevy Chase 100% makes it

They're all crackers, all ear worms and I love all of them.

 

I might change my mind but for now I’m listening to my heart.

 

ELO was like the Smashing Pumpkins of the 1970s, but with better album cover art.

 

Given the option, I simply cannot find it in me to not cast my vote for the Fozzie/Kermit duet.

 

As I predicted, this is coming down to a death duel between Lyin' Eyes and You Can Call Me Al. They're so different and currently I feel like Al is going to take it just because it so formally unique, whereas Lyin' Eyes, while it is a completely perfect execution of a country weeper ballad, is still very obviously a country weeper ballad. You Can Call Me All is just kind of . . . its own thing. I love the entire Graceland album. Discovered it in college and listened to it a LOT. I think Simon's songwriting is really top-notch on that record. And he's a consistently great writer, but lyrics like "Why am I soft in the middle/the rest of my life is so hard" and "he sees angels in the architecture/spinning in infinity/he says, "amen and hallelujah." I mean, that's just amazing and those are examples from a song that, being built around that unbelievably great riff, wouldn't even need to have particularly great lyrics.

Side Note: I Know What I Know has maybe my favorite lyrics on Graceland. That song is just so cutting in such an elliptical way. "She moved so easily all I could think of was sunlight/I said, "Aren't the woman who was recently given the Fullbright?" And one of the greatest burns of all time is in that song: "She is the kind of girl who could say things that weren't that funny."

But Lyin' Eyes just gets me right in the heart. It's such a beautifully written song. So many lines in that song have just stuck with me for decades now: "the cheatin' side of town," "I guess every form of refuge has its price," etc. And near the end, there's a five line run that is just some of the bitterest medicine you'll find in a country song: "She wonders how it ever got this crazy/she thinks about a boy she knew in school/Did she get tired or did she just get lazy?/She's so far gone, she feels just like a fool/My oh my, you sure know how to arrange things." holy **** that is brutal. And it's all married to a gorgeously sad melody and a simple, but achingly sad arrangement.

Also excellent:

Sledgehammer; I discovered So in college too, around the time I really got into Graceland. I'd forgotten just how hard Sledgehammer slaps. And I'd completely forgotten those synth runs in the middle.

Movin' Right Along; haven't seen The Muppet Movie in years, but this is a great song. Just so sweet and fun.

Love Shack; I think the B-52s had a rawer, stranger sound on their first record, but maybe that's just because that's the first one I heard. This one still has some weird energy, but it's not quite as weird as they could get. But it's a great song.

Also, I didn't recognize either The Things We Do for Love or Telephone Line from the list, but I recognized them as soon as they started. Those are also quite good. As is the John Denver track. He was a better singer than he gets credit for being, I think. I suspect he's thought of as being kitschier than he actually is.

EDIT: If You Can Call Me Al does indeed edge out Lyin' Eyes, you can basically put it down to that little five second bass solo, which I had completely forgotten about and is maybe just that one extra bit of needless excellence to push it over the top.

 

Ha! I was in the car with the family today, and You Can Call Me Al was on the radio. And I know exactly where that bass solo is. So as I was driving, I said: "Anna! Karin!". They said, "what?", and I said: "bass solo!", and then it punched in.

 

I'm with @Ramza , only reason I didn't vote for 'You can call me Al" is because it won (by a landslide IIRC) in the last playlist.

 

I think this is the first playlist where I know all the songs really well. I've got to say that Call Me Al always sounds great to me, and I actually don't have Graceland, but as it's already on the last list I'll break the current deadlock and vote for Sledgehammer.

Cool list.

 

Same. And same. And same.
And same.

Edit: and, same.

 

Scanning the list, I like Telephone Line by ELO.

 

Firstly, everything you said about the album I agree with, and it's hilarious that it was accused at the time of cultural appropriation and a lot of leftist artists were pissy that he'd broken the embargo on Apartheid South Africa. To argue this album fuels the apartheid regime when it's a celebration of African music that would never have happened had Simon not had his personal and professional life in shambles and discovered a bootleg tape, is idiotic.

I already said but Under African Skies is my personal favourite, but there's a really beautiful exchange in Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes where the bass and guitar are "talking" to one another. Bassist Bakithi Kumalo talked about this on the DVD Classic Albums (VH1) - he wrote it to be a call and response.

In terms of lyrics too, this:

The poor boy changes clothes and puts on after-shave
To compensate for his ordinary shoes

 

Graceland was the first music album that I owned, or at least got for myself.

The Muppet Movie soundtrack I had on record when I was a kid. I listened to that record over and over and over and...

But man, I loved the video for Sledgehammer. One of the best music videos of the 80s.

 

Sorry, away from the computer earlier today and had to rearrange this all:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6TnhDQD6AuJrfgBvyhWJZV

Decided to go with songs for film, both with and without vocals

As Time Goes By from Casablanca (1942), sung by Dooley Wilson
Casablanca is, in my personal view, the 2nd best movie I've ever seen, and As Time Goes By is a classic. It was also what was played for the only dance at my wedding (in which case, it was longer than I remembered)

Godzilla Theme from Godzilla (1954) by Akira Ifukube
Godzilla's an amazing film that I think is often underappreciated in the US for being a lot more meaningful than just being a monster movie (though the sequels would become that). Still, for all the commentary that the film makes, the music can stand alone as extremely powerful

Main Theme from Psycho (1960) by Bernard Herrmann
Herrmann's music for Psycho is great, and a story from years ago comes to mind... I'd picked a friend up to go somewhere and so when he got in my car, this was playing. His comment had been that it was really good, and a bit later asked what it was. When I said it was from Psycho, he'd commented on it being weird that I was driving around listening to the music from Pyscho. I disagree.

Suicide is Painless from M*A*S*H (1970) by Johnny Mandel
I think more people know the version of this that was used on the series, where there's no words but there is a lot more helicopter. The music is great, but the lyrics just add to it.

Whistle Stop from Robin Hood (1973) by Roger Miller
I consider Disney's Robin Hood to be one of their underappreciated works, and characfters aside, I also think it's got some great music. Some, like Not in Nottingham, are in the body of the film and do have full lyrics. Whistle Stop, though, is used at the opening. It was also sampled and sped up to create the Hamster Dance

Tubular Bells from The Exorcist (1973) by Mark Ayres
Going to skip the movie here and just ask if anyone remembers when, at the London Olympics' opening ceremony, they played the music from the exorcist (this) while a bunch of kids laid in hospital beds, then they were attacked by Mardi Gras Voldemort before being defeated by an army of Mary Poppinses descending from the sky? That was a weird production

Zero Gravity from The Black Hole (1979) by John Barry
The reason I ever saw Disney's The Black Hole was from Stephen Hawking's description of it. Roughly paraphrased, it was "It's not very good, but it has an interesting twist at the end". The music, though, I was familiar with before because this music was good enough that it was used extensively in an episode of Horizon that was about supermassive black holes. I have the score on vinyl somewhere, basically entirely because of this one track.

Suite from Airplane! (1979) by Elmer Bernstein
A great movie, and one that makes it all the weirder to go back and watch Zero Hour!, which is just Airplane! without the punchlines. For as much as it doesn't take anything else seriously, though, they took the music quite seriously and to good results.

Flash from Flash Gordon (1980) by Queen
Having a Queen score elevates any film, and the music from Flash Gordon is far better than the movie would otherwise deserve. Also, more songs need mentions of NASA in theme. It may not be possible for Queen to not overpower the movie their music is paired with, as I think they do the same thing with Highlander (though not quite to the same extent)

Main Theme from Police Academy (1984) by Robert Folk
For a few years, in the era where phones could have fancier ringtones but you had to program them in yourself, my ringtone was this. In that time frame, I think I only had one person outside my family hear it and recognize it. I have substantially more faith in the officers from Police Academy (including when they added citizens on patrol) than I think I have in the police generally in real life.

He's Back (The Man Behind the Mask) from Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986) by Alice Cooper
Alice Cooper's take on this involves some nice incorporation of the original Friday the 13th music, while also being a very solid song. The only entry where I haven't actually seen the movie it's associated with (as there's like, 4 Friday the 13ths in the way I'd need to see first), it's also a solid contribution to Alice Cooper's own album that includes it. Teenage Frankenstein would also be featured on both the album and in the movie.

The Grid from Tron: Legacy (2010) by Daft Punk
One of my go-to tracks for coding, the music from Tron: Legacy was by far the best part of it, since the movie itself, I thought, paled in comparison to the original. Largely because while the first was a quite stylized view of inside a computer, by the time of Tron: Legacy the insides of computers had just become lots of bright and well-lit buildings and the more unique feel had been lost.

 

Not a single track by John Carpenter? I'm not even sure what to say, lowbacca...

 

Isn't he a filmmaker? Isn't that like complaining he doesn't have anything from Frank Herbert?

 

He composed most if not all of the music for his own films.

 

I only get 12 spots, and even with that, while I like Halloween, if it was going to go to another horror film, it'd probably be "In the House – In a Heartbeat" from 28 Days Later

 

Film soundtracks composed by John Carpenter

 

Though I will add, if video submissions would be allowed, the ending for The Howling 2: Your Sister's a Werewolf would be a fun entry. Not remotely board-safe or good, but fun.

 

@Lowbacca_1977 dang it. Now I got to redo my list. I'm doing a soundtrack list as well. Mine is made in a way to tell a story, and I had freaking the Casablanca theme as well to show a romance between the main characters...so thanks a lot.

 

We live in a world with google, and you're basically an AI, so how can you get this so wrong.