Guilty Pleasures on a Saturday Morning

I'm disappointed in myself. Summer's almost half over, and I haven't taken any photos of a shirtless Jimmy Sabbia shuffling down the middle of the street, yelling racial epithets at traffic. His skin looks like he fell asleep while sunbathing with butter, like Kramer in that episode of Seinfeld. I need to get on the ball.

Let's officially start this post by sharing this wonderful shot of a female Wookie, caught outside her native environment, doing her best Ann Margaret impersonation after being subjected to forty-eight continuous hours viewing Viva Las Vegas.

(Shea's gonna kill me).

So I woke up this morning and decided that I'd had enough of listening to the Def Leppard covers record, Yeah! It's their tribute to the British glam rock and FM radio staples that informed their early musical development. They're covering T. Rex, Blondie, Roxy Music (yes, Adam, Roxy Music), Mott the Hoople, ELO, the Kinks, Thin Lizzy, the Small Faces, David Bowie, and Free. This automatically makes Yeah! Def Leppard's hardest rocking album since High 'N Dry, back when Rick Allen had two working arms. In fact, it's Allen's drum sound that's one of the highlights of this record. In the near twenty years since Hysteria (Jesus, it's been that long?), his drum kit has evolved from a total Simmons digital pad set-up back to acoustic hardware, with the electronic foot triggers he uses in place of his missing arm triggering pre-recorded acoustic drum sounds. And Allen just smashes the skins, too. His drumming sets the tone for the album.

Anyhoo, on my sudoPod, I've set up a playlist called "Dusty", which automatically places every song I haven't played. It originally started at 1300 songs two weeks ago. I'm now down to les than 200. some of the songs I haven't played comfounded me. I could have sworn I played the first two albums in Dolly Parton's "mountain trilogy" at least once. But when I was looking at the updated playlist yesterday, there were twelve tracks that hadn't been played. So I've plugged in the iTrip Fm transmitter and am now playing both albums throughout the house. I highly recommend the first two albums in Dolly's "mountain trilogy". The Grass is Blue and Little Sparrow are two albums full of killer, bone dry bluegrass (on the third, Halos and Horns, Dolly starts giving in to the fromage; the album suffers accordingly). My friend Elizabeth, who now lives in Colorado, and I went to see Dolly play at the House of Blues the year Halos and Horns was released. The concert betrayed an impeccably rehearsed setlist, more rhinestones in one room than I've ever seen before, oversaturation of self-deprecating "Kornfield County" humor, and a teleprompter that only could have been more conspicuous in its presence if it was set up onstage.

But that was one of the best goddamn concerts I've ever seen in my life. In the patois of the street, Dolly brung it, kept it real, and didn't front. The crowd - a mix of white trash, urban professionals, music buffs, and drag queens - left worshipping her cleavage.