Happy Birthday, Steve! I was happy to listen to this again today in your honor. Quite a party.

This is a clip from Jools Holland’s show, with a giant band and a ton of backup singers and fans wearing masks, but two things are notable.

Amy Winehouse is as great as you can possibly describe. Not only the sound of her voice, but her restraint! She uses one note where others might use four. It is lovely.

Paul Weller really does get the most he can from his limited instrument, and that ain’t bad.

I’m not sure this was necessary, but it is very nicely done.

Beck made five often great albums to start his career. He was omnivorous in those days, eating up all music and spitting it out as Beck. The song that earned him big attention was a novelty tune, a slacker hiphop ditty he co wrote with Carl Stephenson called Loser.

The first time I saw Beck, at Lallapalooza in NYC in 1996, he played his show hiding behind the Marshall stacks, because the kids were hurling bottles at him. He seemed to be egging them on.

This was weird behavior, and kind of funny, which for me pegged Beck as an antic funster who happened to have a grandfather who was a leading light in the art world’s most antically fun movement, Fluxus.

Beck has since adopted Scientology and made a maddening string of clever but dull records, but I saw him in the Summer of 2013 and the live show rocked. Lots of dance tunes from the early days, the crowd pleasers, and not so many rueful confessions, as has been his wont in many recent years.

Having finished second in the ADL by one half point, I give you Loser:

I’m in first place tonight in the American Dream League. By two-and-a-half points. But it is far from over. At best my odds of winning are 50-50. The Burn Bags have, in Texas Hold Em parlance, lots of outs.

For me this would be less interesting if I’d ever won the league, but I haven’t. It has been 20 years of not winning, and now with three days left I have a chance. I wrote a piece on blog.askrotoman.com last year about the meaning of winning, and the math of it. The upshot, that we’re looking at small numbers, is obvious but not very interesting.

This year I have a better story. I tried harder, and it worked. But that’s bullshit. Hot Chocolate knows that.

Hendrix’s first posthumous album, Cry of Love, popped up in my new releases list today, so I guess there is a rerelease going on.

I’d probably heard this disk when it came out, but not since then. It’s pretty good. Hendrix was great, as long as you like having no space between guitar noises. Then he was really great. So this disk is good, entertaining, I’m not nearly enough of a scholar to say anything about the history, except that when the song Astro Man came on I was caught short.

This is a tune that starts like a punk song, with airy autobiographical mythmaking, without guitars for maybe the first 20 seconds. Incredible.

But even when it settles into a more jamming groove, the sound of the twining guitars (both Hendrix, I’m pretty sure) gets close to Television. Especially the more upfront lead, which invents Richard Lloyd’s sound while he was a boy in short pants.

Not a great song, I suppose, but a different sounding one, with great playing.

One of the funny things that happens when you wade into a mass march is you worry about a police riot.

The marchers are penned into a limited space, and if something were to go wrong the stampede effect might be bad.

My family and I marched today with a lot of folks, and except for one instance where a cop asked us about our respect for authority because we marchers kept breaking a fence joint (she got a lot of laughs), there was no tension. We were walking, the police were protecting, and we hope everyone else was watching.

That wasn’t the case on May 4, 1970. Though everyone ended up watching. Four dead in Ohio.

I ate some mushrooms once, and this song became my favorite song.

Set and setting.