Mister Fusty, Connect EP

By John Lane

In the interest of full disclosure, right off the bat, Mister Fusty (a.k.a. Rob Gibson) is a musical comrade-in-arms who collaborated on a track from my recent album. That out of the way, I was a fan of Mister Fusty long before I mustered up the nerve to ask him if he would work with me.

I discovered him somewhere between his first album Honest Blundering (November 2006) and the follow-up Sparkle Darkly (August 2007). These two instrumental-only albums knocked me off my feet and made me reconsider the whole idea of what it means to write a melody line.
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Bob Dylan’s “Wilderness Years”

By John Lane

“Towards the end of the show someone out in the crowd. . . threw a silver cross on the stage. Now usually I don’t pick things up in front of the stage. Once in a while I do. Sometimes I don’t. But I looked down at that cross. I said, ‘I gotta pick that up.’ So I picked up the cross and I put it in my pocket. . . And I brought it backstage and I brought it with me to the next town, which was out in Arizona. . . I was feeling even worse than I’d felt when I was in San Diego. I said, ‘Well, I need something tonight.’ I didn’t know what it was. I was used to all kinds of things. I said, ‘I need something tonight that I didn’t have before.’ And I looked in my pocket and I had this cross.”
—1979 Bob Dylan interview, from Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, by Clinton Heylin

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John Lennon: Rare and Unseen DVD

By John Lane

The problem with the release of The Beatles’ Anthology video in the late ’90s is that it has spoiled Beatles fans the world over. Add to that the ever-flowing river that is YouTube, which has made curiosity-seekers even more complacent. Want to see a Beatles 1966 press conference? Bingo, with the click of a button you have your pick.

Perhaps it is the veritable abundance of organized material available to the average and dedicated fans that makes the DVD release of John Lennon: Rare and Unseen all the more disappointing and confusing. If I was in the eighth grade and had not yet seen the release of the Anthology or the birth of YouTube, then I might consider this DVD to be a kick. As it stands, maybe I’m just too jaded.
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The Man From Another Place, The Loneliest Cowboy EP

By John Lane

There’s something a-brewing in Scotland, and aye, I believe it has the whiff of genius. (Macbeth, Scotland, witches reference—anyone? Bueller?)

The Man From Another Place (a.k.a. Dan Hirst) has proven himself to perhaps be the next incarnation of Burt Bacharach, providing five cinematic tunes on his debut EP that defy the listener to not daydream or soul-search. The title itself, The Loneliest Cowboy, hints at its instrumental-only air, suggesting a mute cowboy who wistfully ambles along with his ol’ horse and lets the music in his head do the talking while visualizing sweeping country vistas.
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Lost & Never Found Again: LOVE Night Light

When I was a child, in the six-to-eight-year-old zone, I was intensely into a myriad of unexplainables: particularly, UFO’s, Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, Frankenstein, etc. My fascination with these things, augmented by lots of reading, was offset by routine nightmares. Blood-curdling screams would jar my parents awake; they would come running to my bedside thinking that I was being killed by an intruder.
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29 Years On: John Lennon

By John Lane

29 years on, it gets more and more difficult to articulate how much John Lennon’s death meant to me, for various reasons.
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In Praise Of Robert Wyatt

By John Lane

Aye, the following individual is never, ever to be classified as a “guilty pleasure,” understood? Yes, one could use the expression that he is an “acquired taste,” but goodness knows not all acquired tastes are meant to pass the taste test of everyone.

Robert Wyatt is an English creation, one that could’ve only been born of and thrived in England (albeit in a quiet, genteel way), as he has done professionally for over 40 years.
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Sync Diary: Music, Movies, Madness!

By John Lane

Dark Side of the Rainbow (also known as Dark Side of Oz or The Wizard of Floyd) refers to the pairing of the 1973 Pink Floyd music album The Dark Side of the Moon with the visual portion of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. This produces moments where the film and the album appear to correspond with each other.
—“Dark Side of the Rainbow,” Wikipedia

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XTC: The Never-Ending Obituary

By John Lane

I discovered XTC in a rather roundabout way, circa 1985, when I visited my local record shop (anachronistic now, but communal then). The clerk—a Joe-Cocker-esque fellow with buckteeth and rather woolly sideburns threatening to overtake his face—had put on a record by a band called The Dukes of Stratosphear, which played over the store’s sound system. The opening chords of “What In the World” sent me reeling, and I had to find out what group this was. Said clerk snuffled condescendingly and informed me that this was a “joke album” by a group known as XTC. That’s all I needed to know, and I paid the extra money for this import record, 25 O’Clock.
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On British Invasions, And Why They Might Not Happen In The USA Again

By John Lane

I have always been suspicious about the prevailing historical theory that The Beatles became big in America as a direct reaction to the Kennedy assassination. It’s too easy: our beautiful, youthful leader is dead, therefore we need youthful music to wake us up?
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