The Rolling Stones, Tim Horton's, and cars

I made it through work today, and thankfully was not as tired as I feared when I wrote last night's post.  However, it would behoove me to get a bit more sleep tonight.

Well, what have I been up to, you may be asking yourself (or not)?  I am finally reading Keith Richards' autobiography, appropriately titled Life.  I don't know why it's taken me so long to get to it, perhaps I just wasn't in the mood when it was published last year, but now seemed like a good time and I'm really enjoying it. It's particularly fun to read it and imagine Keith is actually telling the story in his own nicotine-ravaged croak of a a voice, while smoking a Marlboro and nursing a tumbler of JD.  Keith is, unsurprisingly, quite a raconteur.  I've gotten to the point where he's just written "Satisfaction" and the Stones have recorded it in Hollywood.  The band is just about to break big in the summer of '65.  Lots of good juicy parts to follow, I'm sure.

This coincides with a couple of nice finds from the Lansing Library Book Burrow, which as I've mentioned before also sells old records.  I happened upon a cache of old Stones albums, and walked out of there with vinyl copies of Through the Past Darkly (Big Hits Volume 2), complete with octagonal sleeve, Metamorphosis (the 1975 rarities compilation released, against the band's wishes, by Andrew Loog Oldham), and Emotional Rescue (an album I'd previously owned on cassette but had been purged in The Great Cassette Purge of 2002).  I'm not a big fan of Emotional Rescue, but I couldn't pass up a pristine vinyl copy of it.  At this point, I pretty much own every Stones album worth owning.

(Brief intermission:  a Tim Horton's just opened last week in Okemos.  That's the sound of the "Hallelujah!" part of Handel's Messiah playing in the background as I write this.  Tim Horton's coffee is more addictive than heroin, and I am currently drinking a cup of it with exactly one cream and one sugar--pure heaven.  I made sure to take the freeway from Lansing to Okemos, giving me just enough time to get a Tim Horton's coffee AND make it to my youngest son's school in time to pick him up from car line).

Metamorphosis is quite wonderful.  My favorite songs so far, two that I amazingly never had heard until just last week (and I thought I was a big Stones fan), are "Family" and "I'm Going Down".  Both songs recorded during the band's golden period of '68-'69.  I may post Youtube clips of these tunes in Brainsplotch, and you  may judge for yourselves.  "Family" is sort of a dark, folk-rockish song with a tinge of the psychedelia that the band had visited in '67.  It features lyrics about a, shall we say, dysfunctional family with lots of issues.  "I'm Going Down" is more of a groove than a well-developed song, but the propulsive engine of Keith Richards (with one of his signature open-tuned riffs) and Charlie Watts (always brilliant on the drums) really get it cooking.  I can see why the Stones didn't give either song a proper release, but "I'm Going Down" might have found a nice home on Exile on Main St.

In non-music news, on MLK Day we are taking our automotive-obsessed six-year-old son to the North American International Auto Show at Cobo Hall in Detroit.  Our "not-quite-as-car-obsessed-but-still-a-car-fan-because-his-little-brother-is-a-car-fan" ten-year-old will be coming as well.  I'm looking forward to it because I've never been to the Detroit car show and will be interested to see what it's like.