Tomorr… yesterday I flew out to Paris to see Mrs. Toad, who has been stuck in God Bless America for the last two weeks because of Iceland’s seismic indiscipline.  We are going to have dinner and walk together and hold hands and generally act like a couple of idiots.  More or less like we always do.  For a couple of curmudgeonly old fuckers who spend their entire lives swearing at one another, we are a pretty sentimental pair, really.

This podcast is mostly based around my Dad and his music.  For my early years I was well into my Mum’s stuff, but as I got older I got more into my Dad’s kind of stuff – Tom Waits, Dylan, Neil Young and all that.  When I really, really got into music it was never into contemporary, modern or trendy stuff, it was always the old shite my parents were into.

I repay them the favour nowadays, or at least, I try to, but I never really picked up on music from my peers, it was always from my folks.  Hence this podcast.

Toadcast #119 – The Popcast

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01. Bruce Springsteen – Thunder Road (05.16)
02. The Band – The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (13.27)
03. Willie Nelson – Mommas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys (16.53)
04. Kate & Anna McGarrigle – Walking Song (24.12)
05. Tom Waits & Thelonious Monster – Adios Lounge (32.54)
06. Elton John – Ballad of a Well Known Gun (41.21)
07. Bob Dylan – Days of 49 (46.07)
08. Elvis Perkins in Dearland – I Heard Your Voice in Dresden (53.49)
09. The Builders & the Butchers – Barcelona (57.51)
10. Jackson Browne – Fountain of Sorrow (66.15)

I’ve mentioned often enough that my Dad, being a Canadian and hence raised on the stuff, brought all sorts of Americana into my early musical consciousness.  He played all sorts of stuff: Neil Young, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Bob Seger, James Taylor, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, The Band, The Holy Modal Rounders and plenty of others.  So for all I think my Mum has probably contributed more groups to my musical family tree than my Dad, I think Dad has probably been responsible for more of the real legends.

He also had a great collection of vinyl, but the whole lot was fairly summarily butchered by the climate when we moved to Singapore when I was about eleven.  The heat and the humidity caused most of it to warp and mould.  It was tragic.  The only thing the old git managed to do was turn his stash of dying records into a series of mix tapes which themselves became seminal documents in our house, due to being ninety minutes apiece of condensed brilliance – a whole collection whittled down to a few tapes.

The one that perhaps captured our imagination the most was the Nostlagia Mix; a collection of the Americana listed above, which just seemed to be bristling with brilliance.  I’ve since tried, using the various internet services available these days, to reassemble these songs, but that only works if you can remember exactly what was on them, which you often can’t.  In fact, it’s often the stray forgotten tracks, rather than the better know and often better loved ones that you still listen to all the time, that give these compilations their texture.  The ones you no longer listen to as often actually become the ones most strongly related to that time, I guess.

Songs like, in particular, Dylan’s Days of ’49 really remind me so strongly of that tape and that time precisely because I barely ever listen to it anymore.  It’s from Self Portrait, and album I just don’t really listen to particularly, so there are not subsequent memories associated with these songs to override the old ones.

Bob Dylan – Days of ’49
Neil Young – Heart of Gold
James Taylor – Carolina on My Mind
Jackson Browne – Before the Deluge

I have to confess – actually I don’t have to; Mrs. Toad would be right on here to correct me if I pretended anything else – that I was a right pussy when I was a teenager. I was still a nice sensitive boy by the time I met my darling girl at fifteen, but I was even worse before that. Even so, even by the time we met, I was still far too soft for a leather-jacket-sporting, drinking, drug-taking party girl who hung out with the school’s rock band to even consider indulging in foolishness with me.  We got on incredibly well and had that sort of unspoken trust that you get sometimes when you click with someone.  So rather, we both considered it – sort of – but in a rare show of good sense for either of us we both knew instantly that it would be an unmitigated disaster, so put that idea to bed for another ten years to mature.

Anyhow, if I was bad then, I was worse in Singapore. I moved back to Vienna from South East Asia at fourteen and it was in Singapore that I first got into genuinely tragic and completely wet teenage heartbreak. Frankly it was, and I’m sure I’m not alone here, just a little pathetic. I look back and I think ‘oh for fuck’s sake man, grow a fucking spine!‘ but t’was not to be. I was a state, a sincere, cowardly sexual retard with another nine years to go before I was to spontaneously and unprecedentedly grow a pair of balls at about age twenty or twenty-one.

Anyhow, want to hear what I cried myself to sleep to after yet another crushing rejection?  Every one to the time-honoured mantra of ‘You’re like a brother to me’ and ‘What we have is so special, I don’t want to ruin it by going out with you’ and ‘But you’re my best friend’ and other such cunning euphemisms for ‘don’t be ridiculous, you dickless wonder’. My friends and I called it ‘the old fuck-off-and-die routine’ because frankly we’d have found being told to fuck off and die more dignified. Lots more dignified.

Anyhow, I’m better now, but I can’t hear these songs without cringing. Worryingly, there may have been worse, but I think my mind has blocked them out, thankfully.

Jackson Browne – For a Dancer
Bruce Hornsby & the Range – The Road Not Taken
Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band – You’ll Accomp’ny Me
The Eagles – Desperado

Yes, I’m afraid so my Toadlings. I seem to have pulled a muscle in my back so at the moment I am shuffling about like I’ve just shat an angry porcupine.

It is, believe me, excruciating. I can’t even find a comfortable position to lie and watch telly, so god knows how the bloody hell I’m going to sleep tonight. Mind you, there I was feeling sorry for myself when it occurred to me that The Band had a splendid song called Up On Cripple Creek which, assuming a certain enjoyment of tasteless and slightly black humour (and let’s face it, you wouldn’t still be here otherwise), seemed rather appropriate.

The Band – Up On Cripple Creek
The Raveonettes – My Boyfriend’s Back Not the greatest song, but that ambiguous apostrophe was just too good to be missed.
Tom Waits – Walking Spanish If that’s what you want to call it.
Jackson Browne – Walking Slow
The Lemonheads – No Backbone