Rosenbush Cafe

Rosenbush Café now has music thanks to Playlist

Mixing a wide range of personal favorite musical selections including: Vangelis, Hot Tuna, Pink Martini, Enigma, Chavela Vargas, Harry Nilsson, Tangerine Dream, The Mills Brothers, Maria Callas, The Ink Spots, 10cc, Hot Tuna, Blue Oyster Cult, Shel Silverstein and The Alan Parsons Project readers can now choose a musical background to enhance their Café experience. Tunes will be changed monthly to keep the playlist fresh and daring. Check the bottom right side bar for the player and enjoy.

Note: I set it on shuffle so you’ll never know what comes next…Grand Funk or Maria Callas? Heh.

Tadream’s life performance 30 minutes; other tracks, varying lengths

WARNINGS: The music may come across loud, which is the way it should, but be ready to adjust your volume control and The Fuggs song contains my favorite Dutch word repeatedly.

By now anyone following my musical posts knows my tastes in music is wide-ranging and offbeat and that I have a special place between my ears for anything avant-garde, psychedelic or bizarrely groundbreaking. If you disinterested in music that transcends the usual boundaries of ordinary you should probably leave…now. Otherwise, sit back, take off your shoes, light incense, and turn on a black light to illuminate your poster of Captain America from “Easy Rider” and if you have a bong, pack the bowl tightly.

Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Crow and The Fuggs will give you a wide array of non traditional and non holiday themed treats to expand your headband. The 1983 Tangerine Dream concert from Warsaw - “Poland” - was a double-LP which has always been a favorite among their live performances; and Popol Vuh was a 1970s psychedelic group in the tradition of early Tadream and Amon Düül (one of the founders of the German rock scene).

Looking through my 8-Track Collection one can still find Crow, a rock group who produced a short list of top forty hits, but had several non hits that didn’t receive airplay outside KAAY’s “Beaker Street” (which ran from 1966-77 on the Little Rock, Arkansas 50,000 watt AM radio station. This was the first underground music station on AM, before FM stations followed the album-oriented format, with deejay Clyde Clifford. I can thank Clyde for introducing me to Vander Graf Generator’s “Pawn Hearts” in 1973 and being patient enough to explain about five times the name of the album, title and track name that caused me to call the station: “Man Erg” and yes, I was stoned to the bats). Thanks to record shows I finally got their three albums and fourth greatest hits compilation on vinyl.

The Fuggs were a mid 1960s rock group today considered a hybrid radical garage band with punk overtones. Their selection is unedited here although when it received airplay you can imagine the word fuck was excised. When I heard the unexpurgated version forty plus years ago I was at first shocked but quickly realized it you were going to sing about the Central Intelligence Agency and their nefarious doings at home and abroad, fuck was appropriate –the obsessive collector

Next Week: Rosenbush Cafe’s Special New Year’s Eve Obsessive Collector will grab you by your ears and stretch your reality so wide don’t be surprised if your brains slide down your chest and get hooked on your belt buckle. Dress casual, come naked or cross-dress, we don’t mind as long as you come prepared to let us rock your roll.

The Obsessive Collector invites you to relax, even if for milliseconds as he takes you on a musical journey, courtesy of Vangelis, King Crimson and the music of the Seventies. As typical of my love of convolution in writing, there are detours into my back lot tour of MGM in 1977 with actor Sidney Lassick, and almost meeting Richard Dreyfuss, recalling Irene Pappa’s orgasmic chanting on an early Vangelis (Aphrodite’s Child: 666) LP and seeing the Empire State Building but not going into it! If you enjoy Savoy Brown, and who doesn’t, Tangerine Dream, Todd Rundgren, the golden eras of music, or the many other pop culture references I can muster check my archives of The Obsessive Collector, where I go off the planet to relive retrospectives musically and hopefully entertain the masses, or at least one lonely person in need of a smile!

Long day at the office on Wednesday or perhaps school was a drag. Drink too much coffee or not enough or no proper meals? Is your wife, husband, boyfriend or girlfriend, lover or acquaintances displeased with you as a person? Did the dog chase the cat unto the keyboards again, only this time erased pictures of your favorite Suicide Girls? Did you buy tickets to see Von Iva at The Mod Club in Toronto only to learn it was last month? Out of soap, toothpaste or time? You last pair of pantyhose has a run, forget them, it’s too hot to wear them anyway and if gas prices are too high for you, ride a bicycle, take a hike or just stay home and read. If you read this entire post your reward is a Lizard Treat at the very end!

Whatever the reasons today doesn’t seemed to go your way there is always tomorrow. Ignore your dopy horoscopes promising the good, the bad and the indifferent. Time to give your neurons much needed entertainment, a bit of surrealism and explore the world of obsessive collecting as only the collector himself can provide. Before your journey into Dadadadadadadada, allow Vangelis the opportunity to soothe your nerves, massage your back and teach you some science with the title track from his 1976 LP, Albedo 0.39. Thanks to the world wide ether and YouTube for saving me from recording my LPs, uploading and downloading and getting another migraine with embedded codes!

Maximum distance from the sun: 94 million 537 thousand miles
Minimum distance from the sun: 91 million 377 thousand miles
Mean distance from the sun: 92 million 957 thousand and 200 miles
Mean Orbital velocity: 66,000 miles per hour
0rbital eccentricity: 0.017
Obliquity of the ecliptic: 23 degrees 27 minutes 8.26 seconds
Length of the tropical year: equinox to equinox 365.24 days
Length of the sidereal year: fixed star to fixed star 365.26 days
Length of the mean solar day: 24 hours, 3 minutes, 56.5555 seconds at mean solar time
Length of the mean sidereal day: 23 hours and 56 minutes and 4.091 seconds at mean sidereal time
Mass: 6 thousand 600 million million million tons
Equatorial diameter: 7,927 miles
Polar diameter: 7,900 miles
Oblateness: 1/298th
Density: 5.41
Mean surface gravitational acceleration of the rotating earth: 32.174 feet per second per second
Escape velocity: 7 miles per second

Albedo: 0.39
Albedo: 0.39
Albedo: 0.39
Albedo: 0.39
Albedo: 0.39
Albedo: 0.39
Albedo: 0.39
Albedo: 0.39
Albedo: 0.39

In 1976, I purchased Albedo: 0.39, my first album by Greek composer Ευάγγελος Οδυσσέας Παπαθανασίου (Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou) better known to the world as Vangelis and I have been a fan and collector since. It started with late night weekend radio broadcasts on KAAY Little Rock, Arkansas The Mighty 1090 with Beaker Street. Intro-ed with a spacey tripped out version of “The House of the Rising Sun,” that wonderful cover song by Eric Burdon and The Animals, they played full length albums and had the most eclectic line up one could imagine, especially for AM.

In my dorm room in 1972-74 I would have to keep a note pad handy because the deejays often sounded so stoned it was difficult to understand who and what they were playing. Thanks to Carl Sagan’s 1980 PBS Series, Cosmos I finally realized Création du Monde was a track from L’Apocalypse des animaux, a score for documentary film maker Frédéric Rossif’s 1973 TV series and I knew I’d heard it years before, but: “That was Vangelis? Wow!” Probably the most romantic track on that great LP is La Petite Fille de la mer, which still to this day can evoke horripilation, tears, a sense of awe and make one want to make love immediately.

Well, to me anyway.

Don’t believe me? Listen and judge for yourself

If you thought that was weirdly beautiful….

What you didn’t listen? Go back and click the link, surely by now you know you can open more than one window at a time. I’ll wait.

….there is always Greek actress Irene Papas having an orgasm while chanting “I was, I am, I am to come” repeatedly during the song ∞ (infinity) on 666 by Aphrodite’s Child. This 1972 LP, which took much searching to find again, after I lost it in a break-up with a girlfriend eons ago, along with Phos, another AC LP, was a niced bit of Vangelis psychedelia. The record label was none to pleased but I loved it and whenever I watch The Guns of Navarone (1961) I get a warm feeling whenever Maria Pappadimos (Pappas) is on-screen.

In a bit of off-track reminiscence, as if I haven’t already derailed, and which is better suited for my El Cine Entree, in our break-up, I also lost my picture of me with my cousin, Emily and Sidney (Chesswick in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) Lassick from our meeting in 1977. He was friends with my cousin and her husband, Ben, who I visited for my Southern Miss graduation gift from Aunt Gin and Tonic (Virginia) Bridgewater who offered the four nephews $1,000, which they took and I didn’t. All younger and more interested in possessions: JJ bought a Rolex, Delmar and Floyd invested and lost in the stock market and I took a trip to visit my mother’s relatives in Los Angeles and my dad’s side of the family in New York City.

Sidney, who died some time back, was a very nice fellow and somewhere, unless Dorma got it too, is my cassette interview with him that may well be lost in the myriad of miasma that is my swamp of a home.

We sat at the house at the corner of Pico and Rimpau, at the end of the busline, playing cards while I recounted my love and knowledge of movies and how Sidney should have won an Oscar, and then he offered to take me on a “tour” of MGM Studios. “I know everyone there,” he told me.

He did.

I knew my trip was better than a watch or investing in stock; years later, I found out I wasn’t good at investments so there! Not only did I get to go onto a movie set - there is something cool about walking up to a guard standing by a sign that says CLOSED SET, near the famous red light that meant they were filming inside, who says “Hello, Sidney. Who’s your friend?”

I would later get a a job offer as a runner, well gopher, that was circumvented by my parents in Alabama. “You’re not staying in Hollywood! You’re not an actor.”

“Gee, but ma…” Actually, I said something like “I’m staying here and there isn’t a fucking thing you can do to make me come home.” That went over well.

Once the light went off we went inside. Sidney knew every tech guy and we had a wonderful time especially when we stepped onto the set of The Goodbye Girl and I stood mere feet from Richard Dreyfuss and Quinn Cummings (the sweet little girl), who winked at me, during a break from filming. I stood quietly, and while I wasn’t going to ask for an autograph - which I would have lost, anyway - I enjoyed having the fantasy of movie-making deconstructed before my eyes. I also enjoyed watching Dreyfuss, who made me feel tall, while he gave grief to the assistant director. The director, Herbert Ross, was not there. Quinn just leaned against the kitchen table, looking bored, while she waited for the disagreement to be resolved, which when I finally left the set to almost fall to my death in a darkened carvernous room full of fake computers, was still ongoing.

As an avid movie lover, who dreamed of working in films, not as an actor because my high school Thespian days proved I was more suited for pulling open the curtain for my “talented” school mates in The Crucible than portraying Thomas Puttman. I would never return to the Bama Theater, where, as usher and assistant manager, I once stood on a ladder to put up the letters on the marque for movies like Walking Tall, The Mack or Deliverance to see Starring Henry B. Rosenbush in a Martin Scorsese Film.

Actually, I wanted to play the judge so I could say, “God damns all liars,” but that went to a black football player instead, who while he wasn’t bad he only wanted to say god damn in a school play. The school administration made us delete “Fart on you, Thomas Puttman,” which after the first showing - we had three more - was returned to the glorious applause of our school mates who all made farting sounds in the audience! Aaaah, off-off-way-off Broadway!

Whew. Take a breath.
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Peter Churchmouse: An Early Favorite

WARNING: Language and themes will be offensive and inappropriate for some readers and gratuitous for all others! Special thanks to Paul DaliHouse Dorsey

By Henry B. Rosenbush

I have been a collector the vinyl long playing records since the 1950s, a passion that began when my father played Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade on a set of 7-inch 45s. It would be the early sixties before I learned Шехерезада was actually a symphonic suite in four movements rather than a collection of shorter works; such was the limitations of the 45 format.

Over the years I was fortunate enough to explore every new technology from Victrola to Hi-Fi for Small Fry, as they called record players for children, and then stereo. When stereo first arrived, much like the transition from black and white television to color in 1964, Beta to VHS or the most recent change from analog to high definition, there were few true examples of stereo recordings. One could play a stereo on a Hi-Fi record player but without the ability to have two channels or multiple speakers it was difficult to enjoy on the intended level.

Our first stereo system was a huge clunky affair; a long enclosed set up with record player, AM-FM radio and two moderately sized speakers. Naturally, you could play Hi-Fi recordings, 45s, 78s (many children’s records were 78s as well as jazz recordings) 33 1/3rd the standard 12-inch discs and 16, which could be practical in school for slide shows and film strips but less practical at home unless you had instructional manuals to investigate.

It would be the combined work – separately – of three men that led to the disc records that dominated the music industry until compact discs appeared in the 1980s effectively ending the gramophone record. French inventor Edouard-Leon Scott, would design in 1857, the phonautograph, which basically allowed a depiction of the visual characteristics of sound but not for playback purposes until Thomas Edison developed the phonograph in 1877, which could play back recordings but was primarily used for dictation and further developed by Edward Guilliard, who would spend the next quarter of century fighting for credit since Edison incorporated Guilliard’s innovations into his own patent.

The phonograph cylinder dominated the market starting in 1880 but as lateral-cut discs, created by Emile Berliner in 1888, began to appear musical recording began to change. Edison produced his own version, the Blue Amberol Record, in 1912, to compete with the Berliner Gramaphone label offering recordings as long as 4 minutes! By 1918, patents for lateral-cut discs expired and the market was open to countless manufacturers and by the twenties, the Amberol cylinders became merely a memory.

Our Victrola was a right-sized hand cranked device which used steel needles and there were two small doors on the front that by opening and closing ‘controlled’ volume, pitch, treble and bass! Naturally, there was no such thing as control: you cranked the cylinder beneath the platter for speed, which was generally enough for one side of a record before it s l o w e d d o w n and s t o p p e d…

The needles were designed to be used once - I had to special order stainless steel needles from New York in the 1980s because record store employees, usually college-aged students, had no idea what the hell a Victrola was never mind “steel needles!” Imagine sitting on your front porch in 1926 listening to Mario Lanza or Al Jolson for the first time. We take for granted today not only the experience but sheer volume of availability of product. In the beginning, the earth was unformed and so was the music industry.

Thanks to dad, I was more aware of Glenn Miller, the Dorsey Brothers (Tommy & Jimmy), Benny Goodman, the Ink Spots, Mills Brothers and classical music before I was introduced to Elvis Pressley! My aunt Virginia took me to see the Swan Lake Ballet and the opera, La Traviata, in the late 1950s so even Tchaikovsky and Verdi preceded my knowledge of rock ‘n roll (1954-63).

My First Purchase: Around the World in 80 Days (1956)

Like most children, I had albums and 78s by The Flintstones, Quickdraw McGraw - and sidekick Baba Looey, Peter Churchmouse (I only have one of the two LPs left and no cover - sigh), The Gingerbread Man and my first acquisition, the original soundtrack recording of the first motion picture I ever saw, at age three, Michael Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Boy did I grow up with a crush on redheads thanks to Shirley McLaine! Purchased in 1961 at a yardsale of a woman who lived next to my aunt and grandmother, Rosa, in Homewood, Alabama, it was the beginning of a collection that would eventually climb into the thousands!

When Southern humorist Brother Dave Gardner played the University of Alabama in 1963 I was fortunate that one of our tenants at The Henry Apartments left behind the album of his concert and my collecting days began in earnest as I began searching for his other recordings and even got to see him in a Birmingham nightclub in 1971…that’s another story for another time, however.

By 1967, when I bought The Bee Gees “First,” their great ballad-driven album, which was acquired thanks to Virginia: “What do you want for your birthday?”

“The Bee Gees first album.”

She gave me the necessary $7.98 and I went to the record store and now knew the experience of wanting a particular record; I mainly wanted it for the song, Turn of the Century, but soon learned every song was worthwhile.
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Iris Camma and her Band will perform live am 11.7.08 im EGA, Windmühlgasse 26, 1060 Wien Jardin de Verao, EGA Sommergarten. Iris Camaa, vox; Bernhard Eder, keys; Darius Edlinger, guitar; Stephan Först, bass; Bastian stein, trompete; Sebastian Grimus, sax; Shayan Fathi, drums; Nelson Williams, perc Tania Saedi, backing vox; and Angie Reisinger, backing vox. Eintritt frei, Beginn 21.00. Eine Veranstaltung die den Verein Rosario de Luz, der Kinderdörfer und obdachlose Kinder in Brasilien unterstützt. Editor’s Note: She is quite good; I originally heard her through my Tangerine Dream collection and although she is not likely to perform in Alabama for Homecoming, I always hope to one day have enough $ to travel to Europe to see a live perf. I’ve promoted her before, atlhough I doubt she’ll ever know it, but she is so good I cannot help myself.
Iris Camaa