Elton John: Your Song
Petula Clark: This is My Song

John Waite: Missing You
Jack Johnson: You’re Missing Me

Petrie & Wingate (1898): I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard
Paul Gilbert: Get Out of My Yard

Noel Coward: Someday I’ll Find You
The Fray: You Found Me

Irving Berlin: When I Lost You
J. Geils Band: I Must Have Got Lost

Milli Vanilli: Girl, You Know It’s True
The Black Seeds: So True
Spandau Ballet: True

The Beatles: Yes It is
Yoko Ono: A Thousand Time Yes

Elvis Costello: Accidents Will Happen
Tech N9ne: It Was an Accident

The Temptations: My Girl
Paula Abdul: Forever Your Girl

Mary Wells: My Guy
Josh Turner: Your Man

Neil Sedaka: Oh, Carole!
Carole King: Oh, Neil!

Grease soundtrack: We Go Together
Tom Lehrer: We Will All Go Together When We Go

Do you realize how many bands think it’s cool to take their promo photo out standing in a field? Like, one in three. And how many do you think like to use the railroad strain as a backdrop? Nearly as many.
That’s why cat vomit got our attention. They don’t have photos of themselves, of any kind. But they’re playing a gig Friday in a field they found on a deserted rail track just within the city limits.
Turns out the land is managed by a private developer happy to rent it for a day as a social experiment, and who has already been inspired to try rounding up some potential festivals.
So it’s only a matter of time before ethnic folkdancing overwhelms this quaint rock field. Toss the pebbles while ye may. This land is still our land for the nonce.

Track Field Festival Number One features Mattie B. Sack and Kuttomquosh, Stooping Bush, The Beldens, West Crib and Ghost Mother in Law. No other shows worth mentioning. This one is outstanding in its field.

Mailed it.

There can’t be too many covers of Bacharach/David songs. Especially “Walk On By,” which has been walked around the block by everyone from Isaac Hayes to the Stranglers. This is one that might as well have come from one of those faceless lounge-music slabs of vinyl in the 1960s. Which is a compliment—it captures a mood perfectly, and understands the technology required to make something sound truly Bacharachian. The two originals on this EP sound, if anything, even more true to the period—the soaring, weaving backing vocals, the woody percussion, the flamenco guitars…

Californian is the first of three three-songs EP which Explorers Club is putting out in advance of its second full-length album, Grand Hotel. Each “Suite” contains two songs which will appear on Grand Hotel (albeit mixed differently; Mark Linnett is handling the album versions) plus one cover tune which won’t. The EPs are available free on Amazon.com. Californian Suite is out Oct. 25, with the Carolinian and New Yorker suites following in November and December.

Explorers Club makes the sound assimilations of Wondermints or High Llamas sound distanced or ironic. The elderly should pick up on this band along with the retro-hipsters. I fully expect to see these Suite EPs in the bins alongside 1000 Strings at the local Salvation Army.

The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning and Other Adventures in American Enterprise
By David Owen (Villard Books 1988)
Got this as a remainder in a library sale last month, finally got around to browsing it at bedtime, and was startled to find I knew someone in it. Charles F. Rosenay!!!, a local entrepreneur who specializes in Beatles and ghouls whose exploits I’ve been covering of and on for a quarter-century or so, figures in the first paragraph of “Ecstasy in Liverpool,” an essay about a Fab Four fan excursion in 1983, when such things were still a novelty (and before Rosenay!!! started hosting them himself).

Nothing gets dated faster than books about business, but these are entertainingly written, popular-appeal articles originally published in The Atlantic and Harper’s and still amuse and enlighten. They’re about businesses we still care about whose aims haven’t changed all that much, or were changing as much as they ever had right when Owen was writing about them. Other writers have been fascinated by failed inventions, but few have been able to control themselves and keep to 1200 words.

Owen now writes for the New Yorker, and he had that informative-yet-frothy style down over 20 years ago.

VOTE ! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!
Yes, the primary was important, but this is the clincher. VOTE!
List of polling places is here. VOTE!
If you think the new guys need a chance. VOTE!
If you think the old guard is all right, VOTE!
Vote longterm. Give contenders the hope they need to inspire thme to run again if they miss out this time. VOTE!
Get in practice for next year’s presidential election. Start local. VOTE!

Roger Uihlein is once again running as a Write-In candidate for mayor; I’m doing another one of my Play in a Day projects at his joint, Never Ending Books on State Street, today. On some previous election days, I’ve taken the girls to the P.T. Barnum Museum in Bridgeport as a bit of wry social commentary; Barnum knew from suckers, and was active in state politics. Doing a commedia piece at Roger’s place will have its own Election Day meaning.

Alice Cooper: No More Mr. Nice Guy
Eric Roberson: Mr Nice Guy.

Iggy Pop: No Fun
Spongebob Squarepants: F.U.N.

Nirvana: No Apologies
Grace Potter & the Nocturnals: Apologies

The Human Beinz: Nobody But Me
Lykke Li: Everybody But Me

Techtotronic: Pump Up the Jam
MC5: Kick Out the Jams

Journey: Don’t Stop Believin’
T-Pain: I Can’t Believe It

Ringo Starr: The No No Song
Foxy Shazam: Yes! Yes! Yes!

Lemonheads: Great Big No
Jason Falkner: Great Big Yes

Big Joe Williams: Baby, Please Don’t Go
Moody Blues: Go Now

The Beach Boys: Be True to Your School
The Replacements: Fuck School

Sigur Ros: The Nothing Song
Billy Preston: Nothing from Nothing
Fates Warning: Something from Nothing
Unakkum Enakkum: Something Something
The Beatles: Something

Felix Arndt: Nola
Randy Newman: I love L.A.

The jamin sons’ band van is an old painted school bus, like a ’60s hippie wanderlustmobile or a fabricated family-pop tv show. The band emulates both images.
What they did not expect the buys to be doing was transporting kids to school.
Singer/bassist Pele has a sister who runs a community nursery school facing closures due to some mountains local regulations. Seems that in order top take average of a state grant she needed to offer transportation to certain students, and couldn’t use civilian vehicles. She begged her bro to get the bus up to code and resume its original function.
Didn’t take much, and they didn’t even have to repaint out. Nor does an earlier commuter run dissuade the band from jamming and rehearsing en route. We were invited on one of the dawn journeys last week and were serenaded the whole ride, not just by the musicians but by several children.
Which is how the Jacob sons is now the house band at Ben’s Place Nursery School. The band is leading a school choir, and the acts will join up for a school fundraiser gig Saturday.

Wrote a long letter to my parents. Didn’t mail it.

Batwings Catwings, Radio.
A-side of the band’s new EP is nostalgic, as I am, for songs that sounded like they belonged on the radio. “I want to listen to the radio,” they sing, with the same earnest appreciation for the medium which led Elvis Costello to dub it “a sound salvation” or The Raspberries to covet a “hit record yeah…” Which is to say not entirely earnest. It’s craving an experience partly because it’s dead and cool. There’s little elaboration, just a winsome, wonder-filled wishiness. The quasi-slick production, with insistent punk undercurrent, fits the desire exactly.