Isn't that something?

I figured I'd wait until next week to start pimping the good shit. The objective is to find lots of sweet music to champion, by people you might not have heard of yet, with the hope that you'll come back here again and again, maybe to say "hallelujah," or perhaps "isn't that something!"

But just to get some kind of flow going, I figured I'd give you a taste of my fave classical piece. The composer is an American named Samuel Barber, best known for his Adagio for Strings, which is that mournful piece you often hear whenever they run a roll call of war dead from Iraq. This is his Violin Concerto, which was written in the 1930s. He's also got a Cello Concerto, a Piano Concerto and something called the Capricorn Concerto, too, and each of them is very different in tone and texture from the other concerti. The orchestra is the Slovenian Philharmonic, conducted by George Pehlivanian, and even though the stage looks kinda like the one at Jackson Hall in the University of California Davis' Mondavi Center, I'm guessing the room is somewhere in Ljubljana, which must be awful hard to pronounce when you're drunk as a bagful of hammers, or hammered as a bagful of drunks. The violinist is Anne Akiko Meyers. If you hear it and like it, go buy a copy. You won't be sorry.

This particular piece makes the good Reverend's staff stand at attention, if you know what I'm preachin' about and I think you do.

Samuel Barber, Violin Concerto, Movement I:

Movement II:

Movement III:

Dunno about you, but that's pretty much the cat's meow. And next week, I'll tell you about a beautiful blonde goddess whose music will send you to a stange and wonderful place. And that's just for starters.

Oh, and the band up at the top? That's Blind Willie, an early-1970s blues band from the Pacific Northwest. Nope, never heard 'em, but the guy on the drums is one of my older brothers.

Open for Bidness

If bloggers are the future of the music bidness, as one so-called in-the-know expert type has alleged, then perhaps it's high time for this Padre to throw his hat in the ring.

This ain't rocket science. I mean, if some overweight purple-haired beeyotch can parlay photoshopping jizz stains on celebrity faces into a meeting and possible deal with Frank Sinatra's old label, then how hard could it be?

Not as hard as arranging bukkake facials with underage chickadees for a few coke-addled and pampered executives, right? So anyhoo, ahm fixin' to put a little Jinx Removing, High John the Conqueror Root Oil-anointed juju on what's left of the music bidness, before the bonehead trust screws the goddamn pooch too completely.

If bloggers are the new record labels, then your Reverend Perez Tilton is Vocalion, Gannett, OkeH and Black Patti all rolled up into one bad-ass mothafuckin' monster.

Consider yo'selves forewarned.