The one piece of furniture I have yet to buy is a cabinet/case/shelf/whatever to house my collection of CDs. I finally unpacked several boxes of them the other night to assess the needed width-to-height ratio, stacking the precious mountains of discs on my dresser. I think it was my dresser – can’t see anything of it at the moment. I had a fleeting thought that I might organize them alphabetically but as I started to run out of room (a conga line of CDs encroached my living room some 600 feet away) I realized I had to cull the numbers.

Mind you, this is a moderate collection, but I intend to keep adding to it for the rest of my life so now is as good a time as any to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I have a lot of chaff in my collection – crap sent to me by musicians, record companies, booking agents, venues, trade rags, radio stations, relatives, friends, nutty acquaintances, the Tower Records sales dude, and the evil infomercial people at Time-Life Music. Some of this crap is from first-rate artists who were either ill-advised or way too high to care. Heh. Some would say these are the cuts worth keeping but no, if it makes me cringe with its C-sharp bending to E-flat or its attempt to rhyme “orange” with “Florence,” it’s simply crap. And some of the crap in my collection has actually hit the number one spot on Billboard’s charts for weeks on end without impressing me one bit. Yes, that makes me a fucking elitist bitch, but I’m not the one who needs to apologize. Not today, anyway.

Some of the songs I have are songs for which the universe should apologize because intellectual property belongs to the realm of inspiration – “an unconscious burst of creativity in an artistic, musical, or other intellectual endeavor…” ¹ – and that kind of thing almost always implicates the universe at large. In other words, don’t shoot the messengers (the singers and songwriters), just blame the atmosphere.

So I still can’t see my dresser, because I never did get around to organizing my CDs once I found the ones with songs for my “truly hated” pile. I did some online research instead to bring you some of my favorite blights in the songbook of humanity:

1960’s
Along with a whole bunch of Elvis & Dion DiMucci and songs like Tie Me Down Kangaroo Sport (such a classic!) there was Please, Mr. Custer, a corny and fairly racist top 40 hit from Larry Verne with such forgettable lyrics as, “There’s a redskin a’waitin’ out there, just fixin to take my hair.”

Did I mention that this was the decade of the story song? Vying for positions on Billboard’s Hot 100 were both Marty Robbins’ El Paso (actually released in 1959 but won a Grammy in 1961 – this was my dad’s favorite song) and this little ditty. I absolutely admire and adore you, Neil, but not because of these lyrics: “‘Bout a fella who was strong as he could be ’til he met a cheatin’ gal who brought him tragedy.”

1970’s
The breakup of the Beatles & the Monkees, new bands named Aerosmith and The Doobie Brothers, Neil Schon goes pro with Santana, Bob Marley tops the charts, Michael Jackson and Donny Osmond duke it out for teenyboppers, and then there’s Gimme Dat Ding, co-written by Albert Hammond who later releases the classic pop ballad, It Never Rains In California.

1980’s
It’s the second British invasion (wuv yoo, Duran Duran!), gays & lesbians are coming outta all kinds of closets, disco slaps people around trying to become legit but dies instead, we all have big, big hair and big, big shoulders, Band Aid starts the era of kaching! fundraising projects, we figure out who The Boss is (and wonder what fool gave him that title), love/hate Madonna, buy Thriller because MJ still has a nose, and listen to sappy crappy pop tunes which is totally NOT hip and NOT cool and kinda CRAPPY but we’re idiots in the 80’s, for the most part. Rupert Holmes follows this tickler with Him and it sells well! As if you needed further proof of our idiocy, we let Debbie Harry rap, fer cripes’ sake – “and he shoots you dead and he eats your head and then you’re in the man from Mars, you go out at night, eatin’ cars” – even if we ARE hip and ARE cool.

1990’s
Music goes truly global, Sinéad O’Connor loses her voice to her lack of brain cells, Color Me Badd records the super-awesome one-hit wonder I Wanna Sex You Up, Santana is back on top, there’s Matchbox Twenty, Pearl Jam, Smash Mouth, and Incubus burning up hit lists. Jeff Buckley comes and goes the way of Michael Hutchence (/sad), and Terrence Trent D’Arby can’t keep his mouth shut while Alanis Morisette is STOOPID enough to piss off Madonna (Career? What career?). All in all it’s a very good decade for music with tons of garage bands on tons of indie labels – yay! So what do the 90’s need to be embarrassed about? This bloated and overproduced piece of self-aggrandizement. Seriously. At least ‘N Sync could dance.

2000’s
The decade isn’t quite over so there’s still room for something truly tormenting to end up in my music collection. For now, though, I’ll have to settle for this one. Or maybe this one. Okay, I’m cheating, I don’t have the last one on a CD. But someone out there does!

What makes your inner ear melt from fear?

^{[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_inspiration}

It always struck me as sad that the most commercial ballad Kenny had recorded in recent years, Keep The Candle Burning, was the one song that he flat-out refused to sing. Granted, paying his co-writer (and ex-wife) any royalties for it would have been painful considering how badly the marriage ended, but it was a beautiful gift of a song – a CD – to a world of lovers. I ached to hear it live but he said no, no way, no way in hell. I always hoped he’d relent and pull out his guitar and surprise me…guess not in this lifetime =(

In his early years, Kenny was known for his vitriolic temper and his penchant for imbibing festive pharmaceuticals to mask some pretty deep issues. The voice, so pure and so giving, still managed to stretch to heaven in spite of his self-propulsion toward hell. Promoters didn’t want to work with him because his mood swings and temper tantrums were too great a risk. But about two decades ago it all changed, in part because he was over himself, in part because he discovered just how much love, and life, meant. He was clean and sober and sounding better than ever.

I met him at that turning point. He and Tom became close friends, and we’ve hosted Kenny for a number of concerts (the last one being just this past February). Kenny is the only person I know of who’s managed to get Tom on a golf course. After a trip to the Philippines, where San Miguel was making a comeback on every TV station, they called and left me a message resembling a vintage commercial for the beer, with Tom reciting the story and Kenny delivering the “it tasted good” line. I wish I had saved it, it was funny as hell. Anytime Kenny was in town, even if we were working together, if I wasn’t at the office when he stopped by he’d be sure to call and say hello. Or call or email just to deliver a really great lame joke. Hah!

When he and Amy were together, he was glad to know that Amy (who also managed him at the time) and I got along so well. We were both strong-willed women but we also had a lot in common. Amy, I gathered, didn’t get along with a lot of female promoter types and I could see why. She only wanted the best for him and was willing to argue to death to get it. At one point after a show, as we were heading to a late-night dinner at pal Fred Livingston’s restaurant, Matteo’s Waikiki, Kenny remarked on how you could tell a good Italian joint by the quality of their pesto. Which I had never had. He and Amy insisted I try it or dinner was off, which is how my love affair with pesto (on pasta, on rice, on eggs, on bread) began. So Kenny gets the Nom-Nom Award^TM for that enhancement to my life…and to my waistline.

Last Monday, Tom called to tell me that Kenny had just spent an hour on the phone with Sweetie discussing his diagnosis of lung cancer. While everyone was in a state of shock, Kenny was looking forward to battling the disease and was scheduling chemotherapy to start this week. Yesterday, I got an uncharacteristic late afternoon call from Tom. “Chanda [Kenny's daughter] just called me,” he said softly, stunned. “Kenny died this morning.” More shock, more sadness. He was at stage IV and he went fast but according to Chanda he was in no pain. After we discussed how we might help with anything, I hung up feeling pretty damned hollow.

So I reached for my Rankin CDs and popped ‘em into the stereo and listened, teary-eyed, to his flawless, scatalogically correct voice. The world is just a little less funny, a little less jazzy. But I’m pretty sure that Kenny can honestly say, of his up times and down times on this mortal coil, that all of it “tasted good.”

Yes, goombah. Thanks to you, it sounded good, too!