Saxophonic Memories

The other day, I posted about memories of being teased because my name had been used for the alien in the TV Alf, whom I remembered as a sax player, like myself. My hunt for the saxophone version of the theme song led me to this website, where many examples of the “sax solo” that became a trend in 80s popular music are available for your listening pleasure (or pain, as the case may be). I now must say, it was not only because of that scene where a weirdly bejewelled Tim Capello plays saxophone in the vampire film Lost …

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Charlatans and Wheat Beer

No, no, this is not a rant about Charlatans. During a Youtube music swap session on chat, I ran across a track by The Charlatans which I came to know in a strange way: my mom bought the cassette tape at a garage sale and gave it to me. I basically responded with, “Huh?” The cover featured an image of a bunch of bananas. It said “Charlatans UK” — the “UK” was because some band in the States had the same name, or so someone told me years later when I was working in a music store. “I bought it …

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Gordon Sellar: This is Your Life! & A Rock Song About Max Planck

Long ago in a noosphere far, far away, I actually played the double bass in a kids’ orchestra, which was slightly humiliating since the lead violinists were 7 and 8 years old and I was in middle school. Anyway, I played double bass pretty good for someone who never quite learned to read the bass clef properly until later. (I knew that this dot on the staff meant that position on the fingerboard, or that alternate position, or even this third one, but I didn’t know what the name of the note was.) Maybe it was rebellion that led me …

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