Friday Random 10 and Casey Kasem

First up - RIP to Casey Kasem. I can't really overstate how important American Top 40 was to me - I listened to it every week, devotedly, and fretted terribly if I missed part of it. It was my Saturday morning routine - enough to make me stop watching Scooby Doo! It was kind of a gateway to a broader musical world - the means of changing from casual listening to whatever was on the radio, to sustained attention to music. And though it was, by definition, a show full of pop songs - before I started listening to it, all I really heard were the AM stations my parents listened to for news and weather - so it infinitely expanded my horizons at the key moment. All that lasted from, oh, 75-80 or so - by the end of high school, I was listening to AOR, and had some records of my own, and had a firmer grasp of my own tastes, and didn't care so much about what the #27 song in America might be - I stopped listening so religiously, though I still managed to get the top 10 in every week, until I went to college... But I remember it fondly, and Casey Kasem's voice, his stories, his ability to play anything and talk about anything as if it were all interesting - a perfect DJ.

And now? My tastes have long since departed the realm of the top 40 - or the top 40 has long since departed me. I suspect by the late 70s, things were already gone from the openness of the 60s, when Eve of Destruction and The Ballad of the Green Berets could hit the charts more or less simultaneously. But that's all right. I can live in the margins...

1. MIA - Sexodus
2. Boris - Fuzzy Reactor
3. Smokey Robinson & The Miracles - The Love I Saw In You Was Just a Mirage
4. Billie Holiday - I Cried for You
5. Rolling Stones - Street Fighting Man (live)
6. Allman Brothers - In Memory of Elizabeth Reed (live)
7. Brian Eno - Dead Finks Don't Talk
8. Robert Wyatt - Just a Bit
9. Audioslave - Hypnoptize
10. Donovan - Atlantis

Video? I stopped listening to the top 40 about the time I started listening to U2 - so - probably not likely to stay up, but here you go - the letter U and the numeral 2.



And maybe something that wouldn't fit on the top 40 very well - Allman Brothers live:



And of course - Scooby Doo!