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The fool on the hill

hogshill

I got nothin’ today, so here’s a snapshot I snagged last week when we went for a nice long drive. I’ve been meaning to post it. That dark thing is the windmill on Hogs Hill near Winchelsea, which was renovated by and is currently the recording studio of Paul McCartney.

Once in a while, McCartney wanders into a pub for a beer. Afterwards, the locals are all, like, “guess who was in for a pint last week?”
“I don’t know, who?”
“Paul McCartney.”
“Oh, aye?”

And then everybody tries to act all casual about it.

It’s really cute.

Comments


Comment from dfbaskwill
Time: February 12, 2009, 8:48 pm

I know a friend who imbibes at a bar in Central Pennsylvania frequented by one of the Monkies,(Hey, hey I’m a monkey!). But I can’t remember which one! I guess it doesn’t really matter now does it. (Another one of the Monkies inherited a lot of money from his mother, the inventor of White-out.)


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: February 12, 2009, 8:56 pm

My very first LP was a Monkees album. That’s shaming on SO MANY levels. And it was Michael Nesmith’s mum.


Comment from iamfelix
Time: February 12, 2009, 9:33 pm

My first LP purchased with my very own dough (from babysitting) was this – being a Motown gal and all. My first LPs evah were numerous Beatles ones, purchased by my longsuffering parents. I was 12 in ’64 when they really hit it big, prime age for Beatlemania. My mother (an artistic sort, like our Stoaty) painted a picture of them on my 12-year-old birthday cake with food coloring – It was loooovely. All of my friends were insanely jealous. I so wish I had a picture of it.


Comment from blake
Time: February 12, 2009, 9:51 pm

Mmmm, I think my first cassettes were Donny and Marie and Captain and Tenille. The Monkees have defenders, at least.


Comment from Andrea Harris
Time: February 12, 2009, 11:20 pm

I was born and raised in Miami and didn’t get out until 10 years ago so I was there when the place started getting noticed by actors, due to the whole Miami Vice-inspired “oh, Miami is a cool place with big beaches and hot Latina chicks!” thing. One of my childhood hangouts was Coconut Grove (yes, of song and story — actually, my grandparents lived there and my parents used to go to the American Legion there and hang out at the bar, so it was just a place to me, though full of hippies and neat shops that sold scifi paperbacks, cards with space unicorn art, and incense), and it changed from a raffish hippie crash place to an overpriced yuppie hole in jig time. Once I was wandering through the new shopping mall there that they built (in the process erasing a neat head shop where I used to buy the aforementioned incense and space unicorn art cards, also my first paperback copies of the Gormenghast trilogy), and I walked past Danny Aiello. He was really short, like five feet tall.

Then I moved out of Miami. You don’t see celebrities as much in Orlando. I think Disney World keeps them in a special pen.


Comment from Andrea Harris
Time: February 12, 2009, 11:24 pm

My first vinyl record was a 45 of the Osmonds’ “Yo Yo.” My first record album was either the Beatles “Magical Mystery Tour” or Neil Diamond’s “Jonathon Livingston Seagull.”

Hey, I was like ten years old or something. I didn’t have to have pride. I also once owned a copy of the Archies’ Greatest Hits, but my sister left it out of the jacket on her bed, and the dog jumped up on it and scratched it all to hell.


Comment from Lipstick
Time: February 12, 2009, 11:51 pm

Eh, I never got the whole “Beatles” thing.

I was rocking out to The Partridge Family!


Comment from Jill
Time: February 13, 2009, 12:30 am

I may have previously mentioned that the first record anyone bought for me was The Chipmunks Sing The Beatles. I was 4. The next year, I bought (with my own money) Johnny Cash: Live From Folsom Prison.

My very good friend, the Reverend Billy C. Wirtz (look him up) told me a story about playing a bar in the Netherlands. Billy is a boogie-woogie piano playing foo-wul, and he’s in this bar filled with non-English speaking soccer players slam dancing to boogie woogie piano. One of them slams into his piano and falls to the floor. He jumps up without missing a beat and says to Bily the only thing he knows in English: “Hey Hey Veer Da Munkeez!!”

lol


Comment from Jill
Time: February 13, 2009, 12:35 am

Bily=Billy


Comment from Gabriel Malor
Time: February 13, 2009, 1:05 am

My first cassette tape I bought with my own money was… oh, who am I kidding? It was a CD, but I don’t have any idea who it was.


Comment from Mrs. Hill
Time: February 13, 2009, 1:30 am

My first Beatles record was found treasure, rescued from behind the radiator of my new bedroom when I was 10 (which was the year they broke up, so it was already “old”). It’s the single of “Eight Days a Week” with “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party” on the flip side — yup, I still have it!

It’s on the LP shelf along with such oddities as a whole stack of Little Golden 78s that belonged to my brother and me, and a 33 1/3, cereal box cutout of — Oh, dear — Bobby Sherman — yikes! (I loooooved Seattle. :P)


Comment from Enas Yorl
Time: February 13, 2009, 3:15 am

The first LP I remember being my own (and not a hand-me-down from older siblings) was Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. My brother got it for me so I would stop stealing his cassette. The first album I bought with my own money was Bad Company’s Desolation Angels. It wasn’t as good as their first album.

Somewhat related – Dad had his 70th birthday this week! He and Mom went to see Donny & Marie Osmond last night at the Flamingo. πŸ˜€


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: February 13, 2009, 7:40 am

I only remember owning two 45s: Dizzy and Windy.

And Windy has stormy eyes
That flash at the sound of lies.

Jesus. The boomers really thought they were superior beings, didn’t they?

Hey, it occurred to me — if Ringo goes first, that’ll mean in the end, Paul was the only Beatle who isn’t dead. Hee!


Comment from iamfelix
Time: February 13, 2009, 9:26 am

Superior?

And Windy has wings to fly
Above the clouds (above the clouds!)

… Naw …. πŸ™‚


Comment from dfbaskwill
Time: February 13, 2009, 10:24 am

When I was a kid, we rarely took vacations. One year we went to King’s Island in Ohio, but the park was largely restricted because they were filming an episode of “The Brady Bunch”. We made our parents promise to go again the next year, and lo and behold, they were filming an episode of “The Partridge Family”. Never got to see much of the park. Maybe that’s why I am lukewarm about Disney.


Comment from Jill
Time: February 13, 2009, 12:00 pm

Mrs. Hill, Bobby Sherman is still pretty darn cute.


Comment from Gibby Haynes
Time: February 13, 2009, 12:30 pm

What’s going on with the fence in the foreground? It looks like whoever put it up was drunk or under duress the way it zigs and zags around, and that he/she finally walked into the canal and then got swept away.


Comment from Nicholas the Slide
Time: February 13, 2009, 1:20 pm

Wow, I feel young and stuff. I’ve never owned a vinyl and had no cassettes to my own name, they all belonged to my parents. The first album I actually bought or had bought for me personally was a CD. I forget what it was, probably because it was some kind of music that amused me at the time but I soon lost interest in.


Comment from Enas Yorl
Time: February 13, 2009, 3:07 pm

I remember when CDs and players started coming out. They were way too expensive for my meager means for many years. I got my first stereo system that had a CD player sometime around 1988 – 89 and my first CD was Dark Side of the Moon πŸ˜€ I still remember the first time I played it and was blown away by all sounds that years of use had buried on the old vinyl record.

Now everything is MP3’s and Ipods and the CD is now “old technology”.


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: February 13, 2009, 3:08 pm

Nobody mention 78s – OK?

Hmrmph!


Comment from Steamboat McGoo
Time: February 13, 2009, 3:20 pm

I was gonna mention 78s, Uncle B…but it made me feel old(er) and I decided to remain silent.

I remember when things went from mono to stereo, too. Nobody thought it would really catch on…


Comment from Gnus
Time: February 13, 2009, 3:55 pm

Me too, McGoo. I remember when stereo was a novelty. Cool, but a novelty. Very few people had stereos.

Oh, and I remember 78s too, Uncle B. Heavy things they were. Must’a been bakelite or sumpin.

I’m ancient.


Comment from dfbaskwill
Time: February 13, 2009, 4:11 pm

When my Pappy finally cleaned out his garage before it collapsed, he found two Victrolas and several wax cylinders they used to play. Al Jolson et. al.


Comment from Christopher Taylor
Time: February 13, 2009, 4:18 pm

Maybe they just realize he’s a pompous, self important twit.


Comment from Scubafreak
Time: February 13, 2009, 4:21 pm

OMG – talk about EVIL CLOWNS……..

http ://images.icanhascheezburger.com/completestore/2009/2/13/128790281738078282.jpg


Comment from Enas Yorl
Time: February 13, 2009, 4:21 pm

No love whatsoever for Al Jolsen eh Mr. Taylor?


Comment from Nicholas the Slide
Time: February 13, 2009, 4:34 pm

Scuba…. *SHUDDER*


Comment from wendyworn
Time: February 13, 2009, 4:44 pm

ARRRRRGGGGHHHHH!

My name is wrong!!!! I didnt know that song was Windy and not Wendy!!! My uncle always called me (what I thought) was wendyworn and sang that “windy has stormy eyes” song to me! He was from Minnesota and they do talk kindof funny there compared to Oregon. I should be windyworn! AWWW the horrors!

I was eight the last time I saw that uncle cause my aunt and him divorced and he moved far far away. grrr. this day sucks.


Comment from dfbaskwill
Time: February 13, 2009, 5:22 pm

Chris? What? Who? ?


Comment from glenster
Time: February 13, 2009, 5:39 pm

I came along in 1961, late in my parent’s lives, and I had no siblings anywhere near my age. I grew up with no concept of “popular music”, that is, whatever was hot on the radio that week. No folky stuff, no Beatles, no rock ‘n roll. I did, however, have 78s that I chose myself. I started “collecting” 78s when I was about 6 or 7 – I picked the ones I thought were neat looking. Consequently, I grew up listening to stuff ranging from Gid Tanner’s Skillet Lickers (from the 20’s) to Teresa Brewer’s “Music, Music, Music!” (from the 50’s). Oh, and the one LP we had in the house: my father’s “Just One More Dance” by Les Elgart and his Orchestra, on a 10-inch Columbia LP.

Hmmmmm, maybe that explains my subsequent goofiness! πŸ™‚


Comment from Christopher Taylor
Time: February 13, 2009, 5:49 pm

McCartney, naturally. The Beatles were talented at creating pop music and PR, but that’s pretty much it. Some people want to treat them like royalty (even the Queen, apparently) but that’s all they were, and I think people who have to deal with them often figure it out pretty quick.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: February 13, 2009, 5:49 pm

Awwww, geez, Wendy. I didn’t mean to be the one to tell you. PLUS that song is the worst earworm evarrrr.

I collect 78s, glenster — and let me tell you, moving those bastards overseas was no joke. I especially like novelty records before 1925, and big band.

So I know all the words to Yes, We Have No Bananas *and* Laura.


Comment from Christopher Taylor
Time: February 13, 2009, 5:55 pm

I kind of like “Windy” but I can see how having the similar name would suck. I knew a girl named Brandy and she got REALLY sick of the song by that name. What a gooood wife you would be…


Comment from dfbaskwill
Time: February 13, 2009, 6:28 pm

I do rate my Pappy a little bit above the Beatles (and The Monkees!). How the British elevate anyone to Royalty when they already have them in abundance is confusing to me.


Comment from glenster
Time: February 13, 2009, 6:55 pm

Weasel, if I may ask, why pre-1925 – do you like the sound of acoustic records? (as opposed to those recorded electrically, for those who don’t know. Electrical recordings, made with microphones and amplifiers, were first commercially available in mid 1925. Prior to that, singers bellowed and bands blasted into recording horns that channeled the vibrations directly to the record cutter – not exactly hi-fi)


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: February 13, 2009, 7:31 pm

Exactly so, glenster. Well done.

It’s not just the sound I like, though. I like the *idea*. There is nothing electronic between the band and you. The gramophone in this form is an idea so simple, there’s no reason on earth the ancient Greeks couldn’t have built one. In fact, I really don’t understand why they didn’t: any bored schoolchild who ever put her head on a desk and hummed knows that sound is vibration.

Pre-microphone recording is literally a tube that ends in a needle that wiggles on a plate of wax that is made to spin. Og the Caveman could almost manage it.

Oh, and novelty records because our great grandparents were bugfuck insane. What they thought was funny is…decidedly weird.


Comment from glenster
Time: February 13, 2009, 10:29 pm

There were some *very* good sounding acoustic recordings made,and to be sure, the new sound of electrical recordings was not embraced by many critics, especially in Britain. Acoustic phonographs were popular with classical music collectors right up to WWII.

There were *many* ethnic humor recordings: Jewish, German, Irish, Negro – you name the ethnicity, *someone* recorded a comic monologue or skit in it. By today’s standards, many are offensive and very non-PC but at the time of their recording, they were perfectly acceptable, even to those whose ethnicity was being parodied.

Wow, could I be any more boring? Click on my name above to go to my site and listen to some neat acoustic- and electrically-recorded jazz tunes and forget about the boring stuff!


Comment from Machinist
Time: February 14, 2009, 3:55 am

I think the Greeks’ desks were solid stone.

More seriously, to be more than a novelty you need to be able to spin the recording media at a constant speed and be able to duplicate that constant speed on all machines. I don’t think that was feasible until the widespread use of the screw cutting lathe and to some extent, the adoption of standardized threads, diameters and pitches for screws. It certainly would have been very expensive before then.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: February 14, 2009, 6:54 am

The spin wouldn’t have to be perfect to make a very impressive proof-of-concept. Rhythm is something human beings have an extremely accurate memory for — hum any favorite song and, while you may not get the pitch right, you will almost certainly get the speed right. So a fairly consistent spin should be do-able even with a direct drive turntable.

As a side note, chest compressions for CPR should be done at the precise rythm — appropriately enough — of Stayin’ Alive. You’re welcome.

Yes, yes…been up since the wee hours, frothing. Uncle B is upstairs sleeping the sleep of the godless, or whatevs…


Comment from Mrs. Hill
Time: February 14, 2009, 12:25 pm

“So a fairly consistent spin should be do-able even with a direct drive turntable.”

Perfectly reasonable, considering what a Greek potter could urn with his kick wheel! And, one step up in complexity, a treadled flywheel can be driven at a pretty constant speed (admittedly, the performance improves tremendously with more precise bearings, balanced wheel, etc. — er, yes, I’m really coveting a better spinning wheel right now).

But a less than constant playback speed isn’t necessarily a bad thing. On the first player my brother and I had — a portable with a crank πŸ™‚ — we considered it a feature!


Comment from Farmer_Joe
Time: February 16, 2009, 2:28 pm

When I lived in Athens, GA, much the same thing would happen whenever Stipe would appear in public.

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