The holidays have come and gone. "Baby Jesus", his crèche and all of the other holiday trimming have been safely stowed in the crawlspace down below the family-room addition.

The many gifts have already been put to use and the corresponding thank you notes have been written.

So why is there one gift that is still resting in its box???   I bought this gift for myself, so it must have been something I wanted, right??   No "buyers remorse" Easy assembly. No tools required. Easy to follow instructions..."plug power cord into wall outlet and USB cord into appropriate port" yada yada yada.

But this overwhelming sense on trepidation  (Definition) keeps me from hooking the damn thing up. It's like the feeling that you get before going to your high school reunion...will your friends still be as you remember them, or will that illusion be shattered when all the nicks, pops and skips come to light. 



So what is this damn thing that has me so discombobulated? (Click to hear)

USB Turntable



It is a turntable to transfer my 60's-70's-80's album and cassette tape collection to the digital MP3 age and I just don't know where to begin. Over the years, I have somehow managed to amass about 150 LPs & tapes. Most of were purchased by me, some are hand-me-downs, and there are a few that I'm not really sure where they came from. Come, let me give you a peek.

Perhaps the oldest album is this one that belonged to my older sisters. Click to listen!! The album cover is not in the best of shape and the sleeve is missing, but it is such a hoot to see what pop music was like in the beginning.  The songs are all about 2:25 minutes long. (The longest at 2:50; the shortest 1:46.)

I can't even describe the advertising hype on the cover.
I quote:  "It isn't rhythm & blues. It's not rock & roll. Its their own special sound, or, as group leader Lennon puts it "Our music is just---well, our music...."

I am curious to hear the sound from this one, as a selling point, this disclaimer is printed on the back cover: "THIS MONOPHONIC MICROGROOVE RECORDING IS PLAYABLE ON MONOPHONIC AND STEREOPHONIC PHONOGRAPHS. IT CANNOT BECOME OBSOLETE."

There a couple of other Beatles album: The White album, Abbey Road, Help to name a few.
One of them has this little note written in ink on the back cover: "By George, said Paul, sitting on the John, where did my Ringo." Those junior-high aged girls can be really funny, can't they.

Then we move on to my first album purchases:

A series of Credence Clearwater Revival albums.



"Click to see "Bad Moon Rising'

  

Click to hear "Down on the Corner"




CCR was the first band I ever saw in concert. (Thanks Bowen) 

Looking Out My Backdoor

  

Click to hear Alvin Crow

Back in my high school/journaling/Margeaux Hemingway days (See prior post) I watched "Austin City Limits" on PBS. One of the groups that really caught my attentions ways "Alvin Crow and His pleasant Valley Boys". They played in the western swing style made popular in the 1930's by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.  I searched all over Kansas City looking the Alvin Crow but had no luck. I wrote my first and only fan letter to the PBS station in Austin bemoaning my inability to find any Alvin Crow albums. And then, after a month or so had passed a large manila envelope arrived at my home. It contained a letter from the band's manager, some newspaper reviews and this album.

I have a couple of others from the same genre: Asleep at the Wheel, Hank Williams Greatest Hits (as in Hank Jrs. father) Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. There are a few country-rock albums:

Charlie Daniels, Marshal Tucker, Pure Prairie League.

And then there's this>>>

An autographed copy, no less.

"To Scott  Love Willie"

Another "artist" I heard on Austin City Limits was Jerry Jeff Walker. For whatever reason, I liked his sound, too.

I know none of my high school buddies listened to him but his style of music was more widely excepted by my college classmates.

Up Against the Wall  I heard this song almost every night when I bar tended at "The Cowboy Palace" during my college days. The clientele at the bar was an interesting mix. Obviously, it catered to the "real" cowboy/cowgirl element native to central/western Kansas, but it also attracted soldiers from near-by Ft. Riley and the fraternity/sorority crowd from the university. (That was the craze since the John Travolta "Urban Cowboy" movie had been such a smashing success.) It made for quite an interesting evening when these three distinct types of males got all fired up on Lone Star beer and shots of Jack Daniels. Throw in a couple of cowgirls in their tight fitting jeans and you got a rowdy crowd that was ready to fight at the slightest misunderstanding. 

But there were other college additions: The Clash,  Jimmy Buffett, Elvis Costello, South-Side Johnny and his Asbury Jukes,  Bruce Springsteen. (I was dating a girl from New Jersey) and Bob Marley. Bob Marley "Jammin" 

After graduating from college in 1980, I returned to the Kansas City area and I was greatly influenced by a couple of local bands: Steve, Bob & Rich and Pats Blue Riddim Band. They both played at night-spots that I frequented.

Throughout the rest of the 80's I continued to add to my collection with works like these:

Mink Deville  (Click to hear)

                                                         Rank and File (Click to hear)

 

The English Beat (Click to hear)

The Specials (Click to hear)

Garland Jefferies (Click to hear)

                                            FYC (Click to hear)



                                                                                                                                                            (Click to hear)     Madness 

Then, near the end of the 80's I went on a blind-date to the "Surf Club" on Manhattan's Upper East Side Article from New York Times 03.16.97  and as Forest Gump said... Click to hear

When I decided to end my hiatus from journaling I opted to modernize my routine and go the blogging route. So before I did anything I had to come up with a name..   Somehow "Prairie Rambler"  came to me and the name fits on so many levels: I grew up in Kansas(Click for map), hence the Prairie; and I have been accused of being long-winded with a tendency to ramble so Rambler seemed to fit.


The Prairie Rambler name can also be attributed to my father. My father loved to tell stories and he often told us about what he and his brothers did for entertainment in the farmlands of central Illinois. (Click for map) To spice things up a bit, the Hinton boys would mount the mud-tires of the Ford Model-T backwards so they would make a loud noise when the drove to town.... The townsfolk nicknamed them the Prairie Ramblers.  Boy, they sure knew how to whoop-it up back in the 1930's.

My journaling career began during my sophomore year of high school (1972). That was when English teachers put more emphasis on content;less on punctuation and spelling. (A real godsend for me.) On top of reading stories like "Lord of the Flies" and "Death of a Salesman" we were required to write in a journal. Every week, I would jot down things that were going on in my life. I probably wrote about things going on at home. (Pending divorce, high school, sister's at college) But I'm sure also wrote about my infatuation with Margaux Hemingway and other schoolboy crushes.


I liked writing these so much that I continued to turn my journals in to my sophomore teacher throughout my the rest of my high school career. My writing continued in college, where I chronicled some of my coming-on-age experiences but it kind of trailed off as the years went by. (Some of those college era notebooks still exist.)   But as the years went by I kind of got away from writing. I can only remember one epic letter that I wrote to my best friend about my becoming a father and moving to the suburbs of Connecticut (Click for map)


Many things have happened if my life since then (some good, some really good & some bad, some really really bad), but all-in-all life's been good (Life's been good clip)
I will write more later.