Number Nine...Number Nine...Number Nine

9 days until Generation Dead is out, but...

Generation Dead is sold out! I repeat, sold out!

Yes, friends, thanks to my good pal Matt, Generation Dead is sold out at the bookstore where he works. Matt managed to sell all four copies in a single shift, rushing them to the sales floor as soon as the box was open. How he got it nine days early, I'll never know. Thanks, Matt!

Just so you know, Generation Dead is not sold out anywhere else, but just in case you should order/reserve a copy today. Those four went fast, I'm told

THE BEATLES (THE WHITE ALBUM), by The Beatles 1968



My second favorite Beatles album, but the one I listened to the most when I was a kid. My father, as I mentioned earlier, had the complete collection of Beatles recordings. One year when I was a little kid I taped all of the albums in the correct chronological order (not realizing at the time that albums like "The Early Beatles", "Yesterday & Today" and "Hey Jude" did not reflect the original U.K. releases, but were instead made up of songs that appeared elsewhere. Most of my favorite songs on "Y&T", for example, actually belonged on Revolver) to give him as a Christmas present. I thought this was a great gift because he'd gotten a new truck that had an actual working cassette deck in it, and I thought it would be pretty cool if we could listen to the Beatles when we took the long ride up to Lynn, Massachusetts to see my grandparents.

Dad had built most of his stereo components, which were from a company called Heathkit, and I'd helped him by sorting the transistors he would then solder in place. He had a wonderful turntable that had a brush that trailed after the needle and nice heavy speakers, and the whole stereo gave off a pleasant smell of oiled wood and plastic when it warmed up. I'd sit wearing his high-end headphones on the blue carpet of the living room and pretend I was on an island all by myself and listen to the radio or, more often, his Beatle records. The TV was in the den, so I'd often have the living room, which was the biggest room, all to myself, and so it was easy to dub all the tapes without his knowledge. I even sneaked his label maker and punched out labels for all of them, liking the feel of the embossed letters on the spines of the cases.

He had a long commute at the time, so I think the gift of the tapes was a big hit, better than the ties or gallon jugs of Aqua Velva or Old Spice that I'd gotten him on previous occasions. Dad had the patience to track the albums down in record stores, but I think making the tapes would have driven him crazy, whereas I liked nothing better than to sit and listen and memorize the lyrics and arcane record jacket symbology while inhaling the smell of vinyl. I found the skull on the back of Abbey Road long before I knew about the whole "Paul is Dead" thing.

Unfortunately, he didn't get to enjoy the tapes very long. They were stolen along with seventy-three cents in change one night when we left the truck unlocked on the street in front of my grandmother's house, all except the White Album, which the thieves had been too stupid to find still in the cassette deck. I was out of cassettes, so that tape got a lot of airplay that year, all except for Revolution #9, which my father hated.

My favorites: Glass Onion, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Me and My Monkey, Back in the U.S.S.R, Helter Skelter, Happiness is a Warm Gun, Long Long Long, I'm so Tired, Cry Baby Cry....I'm really not narrowing it down much, am I?