Internet Archive Pick of the Week: Grateful Dead 1989 Summer Solstice Concert

More people should know about and use the Internet Archive so every Saturday I will feature something from it. Today's selection seems appropriate since yesterday was the summer solstice, it's the Grateful Dead Live - "Summer Solstice" show - Shoreline Amphitheater - Mountainview, CA - 1989-06-21 (June 21, 1989).

Song highlights include Touch of Grey, Box of Rain, Truckin', and Brokedown Palace. The 242 MB zipped file of this concert can be directly downloaded from the Internet Archive or there is a BitTorrent link that you can use as well.

Here's how the Internet Archive is described at Wikipedia:

The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge." It provides permanent storage of and free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books. As of October 2012, its collection topped 10 petabytes. In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating for a free and open Internet.

 

 

Remembering Kirsty MacColl and the Fairytale of New York

Fairytale of New York is a song I usually play frequently this time of year. Kirsty MacColl sings the Christmas song along with Shane MacGowan and his band The Pogues. She has such a lovely voice, I wonder what else she has sung. Then I remember - she's no longer with us.

It may be an unlikely Christmas song as it starts with Shane singing of being in the drunk tank on Christmas Eve. The two then exchange insults: "You´re a bum you´re a punk , You´re an old slut on junk." However the last verse ends with Shane resigned to his love for her and concluding "Can´t make it out alone, I've built my dreams around you."

The song ends with the slightly upbeat chorus, the band playing some traditional Irish instruments. The couple sing:

And the boys of the NYPD choir's still singing Galway Bay
And the bells are ringing out
For christmas day

Kirsty MacColl's death was tragic and happened just one week before Christmas in 2000. She was diving with family and friends in Mexico and a motor boat was where it wasn't supposed to be. Kirsty pushed a son out of the way but lost her life in doing so. (I got this from her Wikipedia entry.)

So the Fairytale of New York is bittersweet for me. A sweet song sung by a beautiful voice but the songstress will never perform again.

 

 

You can stream and download the Fairytale of New York at the Internet Archive. Here's a link to the song's lyrics. Finally you can watch the YouTube video right here:

 

 

Kristy MacColl photograph credit: By K8 fan at English Wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Memorial plaque photograph from her Wikipedia page.

 

 

Turbulence in the Music Clouds, Google and Amazon Both Far from Perfect

This week I tried both Google Music Manager and Amazon Music Importer again. Google was unusable and Amazon needed some work to get it functioning. Even when working properly, Amazon Music Importer will not work with the Chrome web browser.

Google Music Manager would not work properly. I would try to bring up the application from the task bar and it would close itself before I could click on anything! I uninstalled and re-installed it with no improvement so I just removed it from my PC.

I had better luck with Amazon Music Importer. I uninstalled it, updated Adobe Air, re-installed Music Importer and then it worked with Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.

Amazon claims some problem with Flash and the Chrome web browser so you cannot use it to upload music. However you can play music with Chrome, so I guess from time to time I will just use IE 9 to upload my music.

Finally Amazon's music matching service seemed to work well, it will even match ogg vorbis and flac music files. It matches them with high bit-rate mp3s though. I prefer Amazon's look and it seems to match graphics better to albums than Google does. Neither is great but Amazon is the better of the two fairly bad cloud services.

 

 

The Residuels - Pretty Girl

 

 

tags: punk blues fuzz garage garage punk Philadelphia