Who is that? Is that you?
The ring tone on my cellphone is Hook and Sling, Part II by Eddie Bo. It leads to conversations like this, that I find myself having all the time, especially at work:
Other person: Who is that? Is that you?
Me: Yeah, that's my phone. Sorry about that.
Other person: Who is that though?
Me: Oh, ah, that's this guy named Eddie Bo.
Other person: Who's Eddie Bo?
I'm never quite sure what to say. It's a hard question to answer. Maybe in the future I'll send them the link to this blog post.
Anyway, here's a quick Eddie Bo playlist:
R.I.P. Gregory Isaacs
One by-product of having so much music so easily available on line is that there is a lot of music in my collection that I haven't listened to in years, and that my kids have probably never heard. I was just saying that to a friend of mine about Jimmy Reed. Another great example is Gregory Isaacs. Sad that he had to die to get me to listen to him again.
Bonus track: I went to see Phish once, about 15 years ago. After that somehow I got on their email list, so after every show since then I've been getting an email with the setlist of each show. I always read it because I'm interested to see what covers they do. The other night, I saw that they did "Night Nurse", and there was a note that it was the first time they had ever played it. I said to myself "Uh oh. That can't be good.", so I Googled it and sure enough, Gregory Isaacs had died the night before.
Iko Iko all day
Various versions of this are in heavy rotation at our house currently. My friend Bob and I once listened to the version by the Grateful Dead so many times in a row that I can still replay it note for note in my head. We were driving from Colorado to Boston with only a handful of cassettes, including one of the Dead from Egypt in 1978. The first song on side 2 was this version of Iko, and each time, as soon as it finished, we just kept hitting rewind again and again. Neither one of us wanted to be the one that stopped, so we just kept doing it. At the time, I mistakenly thought the lyrics went "Iko Iko all day", and it sure seemed like it. We started it somewhere outside of Buffalo, which Google Maps says is 9 hours away, and that version is 6:47, so that would work out to 80 or so times in a row. Seems about right. Here are some other versions too:
Jesse Fuller's quite an amazing dude
The all-time most popular song at our house is The Monkey and the Engineer. It was so popular at one time that it became a bed time story, which eventually had to be dropped from the rotation because it left the boys more worked up than when the story started. There has been quite a bit of debate over which version is better - Jesse Fuller's original version or a live version by the Grateful Dead from 1969-12-26, so here they both are.