The End of the Henley Hating (but not the Boss Hating)

It was sort of my idea to do Tunnel of Love and The End of the Innocence together. At least it was my suggestion that Bruce has a Don Henley/Bruce Hornsby sound going on on Tunnel that prompted Kid Seed to put them up together. When I listened to Tunnel for the first time in years in preparation for this blog, I realized it didn't sound as much like Innocence as I had remembered. Mostly it's just the title track and Brilliant Disguise that really have that sound. So why did I always associate them in my mind for years?

Aside from the superficial similarities Kid Seed point out in the intro, I think it's because they both have a tone that's at once despondent and defiant. Tunnel's despair is more personal, while Innocence's is more societal, but that brooding quality is apparent in both. And also they're both totally full of shit.

The kicker though, is that while Innocence is a tight, smooth, well-crafted rock/pop time capsule of 1989, Tunnel is just, well...I don't think Len Barker and I see eye to eye on much musically. I mean, we like a lot of the same shit, but being a musician, I think Len probably has a lot broader interests than I do. But we're muy simpatico on Tunnel of Love. It stinks. There's no getting around it. I can't conceive what was going on in the minds of the RS voters who put Tunnel in the top 500. You can't call it Bruce's worst album ever, because he did release Human Touch, after all, but come on.

I'm probably even prepared to give Tunnel a bit more credit than Len, because I do pay attention to rock lyrics (in fact I think they're the most important part of the best rock music since rock & roll is basically our poetry) and the lyrics of certain tracks have the making of something sort of kind of halfway decent. Maybe.

On the other hand, I'm going to defend Innocence against all the haters on this blog. I most love its cohesiveness. It sounds like it was thought out and put together as a real album, as opposed to just a bunch of songs. The tracks flow into and build upon each other in a way that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. And how can anyone bitch about Axl's vocals? There's no song that was ever made worse by adding Axl Rose vocals. Now if only he would finish Chinese Democracy. click here to
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It's Worse Than Trying to Organize a CD Collection. Much, much worse.

I was originally going to write a whole lot about David Bowie, despite the fact that I don't have a strong opinion about him one way or the other. Musicians who are about the show first and the music second have never much interested me. So I will sum up what I was going to say that it wasn't until I was in Dublin in 1994 and spending late, drunken nights at this pickup joint called Major Tom's, that I investigated David Bowie a little further.

As an aside, the pickup joint I knew seems now to be Dublin's first and only Australian bar. Who knew there was even such a thing as an Australian bar?

So what I really want to talk about is the all-important topic of mp3 organization. (btw, can we all agree that mp3 is a useful shorthand for music files in general, whether they are actually in mp3 format or not?) Prior to downloading it for purposes of this blog, I did not own Ziggy Stardust. But I did own a 2-disc David Bowie singles collection saved neatly on my hard drive at My Documents>My Music>Zune>David Bowie>Singles Collection, Vol. 1 (and a separate folder for Vol. 2). Volume 1 included 3 of the songs from Ziggy Stardust.

So I was faced with a choice. I could download the entire album, in which case the Zune program would very neatly read the new album and place it in my library at with the album art in the directory which I set up My Documents>My Music>Zune>David Bowie>Ziggy Stardust. That would essentially waste hard disk space on copies of 3 songs already stored in the Singles Collection directory.

Another option was to just download the songs I did not have, and then create a playlist with all of the tracks in the correct order. The downside of this is that when looking at the album in the "album view" of Zune (or any other music player) it would appear to be incomplete. The 3 songs that are in the Singles Collection folder would seem to be missing. And to listen to the album I would have to click on the playlist I created. I would not be able to just click on the album. And were I to save the playlist to my Zune device and listen to it there, as the songs from the Singles Collection folder played, my Zune would display the Singles Collection album art, not the Ziggy album art.

So the choice is to "waste" disk space on 3 duplicate files (albeit with different tags) or to have the album saved all in once place for organization purposes. It's an issue that is going to keep coming up. I have every CD that the Angry Young Woman and I own ripped onto my hard drive. Many of those are greatest hits CDs and multi-disc anthologies from artists on the RS 500, like Marvin Gaye, Bob Marley, Ray Charles, Al Green, etc. As I obtain the actual full albums on the Rolling Stone list, if I download the whole thing every time (as I did with Ziggy) I am going to wind up with many, many instances of the same song saved in multiple directories with different tags. That's potentially a lot of disk space "wasted" on duplication.

Although as I write this I now realize a third option.: I could have downloaded only those tracks I didn't have, re-tagged the 3 tracks from the Singles Collection and moved them to the Ziggy folder. So in the album view it would be the anthology that would be missing tracks, not Ziggy.

I wouldn't really even need to create a playlist for the now-depleted anthology because if it's just a collection of singles, what difference does it make if a song or 3 is missing from a 40 song collection?

On the other hand, there are certain anthologies, like the Bob Marley Songs of Freedom 4-Disc set, that I would not want to break up in that fashion. Which leaves me right back at my original dilemma of wanting to be a completist with my albums but not wanting duplicate tracks on my hard drive. This is also the most time-consuming option, because it involves re-tagging the three tracks to match the downloaded Ziggy tracks.

How do other people deal with this issue? It must come up for people all the time. click here to
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Exit Music (For a Dodge Neon)

Ok Computer (which I am listening to right now - I'm going to make it a habit to post while I'm listening to each album) reminds me of my first car. Well, not my first car ever, but the first car I ever bought with my own money (which, so far, I have only done twice) and also the first new car that I ever owned. It came out around the same time I bought my 1997 Dodge Neon. I was trying to save money so I went with the cassette deck option (and also the 72-month loan instead of 60, which I think cost me money in the end but I was all about the lower monthly payments) and on the strength of "Karma Police" I borrowed someone's CD (cannot remember whose for the life of me) and made a tape of OK Computer to listen to in the Neon.


It was one of only 3 or 4 tapes I ever got around to making, and I spent a lot of time in that car, so I listened to it over and over. Actually, I listened to track 6-12 over and over. Tracks 1-5 were on one side of the tape and 6-12 were on the other. Although I was in the car a lot, it wasn't often for long enough to listen to a whole album so I frequently rewound Side 2 and listened to "Karma Police" through the end over and over. And over. Tracks 6-12 were my soundtrack for a lot of late night, aimless drives around the Washington Beltway in the late 90s.

Once I sold that Neon to my sister in 2002 I didn't have any means of playing cassettes and I never got around to getting it on CD. I guess I had listened to it enough to hold me over for years because it wasn't until I got my Zune last Christmas and got all of my music organized onto my computer that I bothered to download it and listen to it again. It's great listening to it again, but I can't imagine ever getting on a kick again where I listen to it often. It's too fixed in time for me. Or something. click here to
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