My Final Blend

Nah, don’t be silly - I’m not stopping this weird project! I do believe I need to perhaps create a Top Ten playlist, or a “The Best Of” playlist to make the collection less unapproachable. I mean, more approachable. No, I mean less unapproachable.

The source material I’m using is from the last 7 decades of music, and some of the covers were released many years after the original, which means very different styles of music are being subjected to the misery of my cross-fade process, and that (consider the contrast in a posy of flowers made of dead weeds and very-much-alive-chrysanthemums, or the ineffectiveness of a house built with polystyrene and titanium blocks) effectively removes quality and emotion from the artist’s output.

Some of the more distant cover ‘relatives’ are stored in the Level 3 Blend folder, like Labi Siffre and Madness (21 years), or Elvis and Pet Shop Boys (14 years). And then some are surprisingly close to each other, like the following two Blends.

Bruce and his band wrote the music but there were no lyrics, only mumblings. In 1977 his engineer, Jimmy Iovine, was producing Patti Smith’s album in the same building, presented her with a recent vocal-less mix on top of which she wrote her lyrics, and that’s how the songs was written. It was her biggest single. Bruce performed it live a few times, and a version was released in a box-set (remember those?) in 1986 and on a compilation album in 2010.

I think there has always been people with cocaine problems, much like there have probably been alcoholics since we discovered fermented fruit in the forest. It’s a shame so many people have a bad relationship with cocaine, and I’m lucky not to have found myself in a circle of friends with this problem; peer pressure can be a powerful, and sometimes unavoidable thing. J.J Cale’s track Cocaine is not a ringing endorsement for the drug, and Eric Clapton reportedly had an unhealthy addiction, possibly the reason behind covering the song. The two versions aren’t so different from each other so the Blend isn’t so jarring for the ears.