Organ Grind at the Funeral Parlor

It's been a crazy couple of months, starting a freelance gig that equals out to a hundred mile commute every day, the frenzied holidays with relatives in town, lady with bronchitis, and now me staving off a cold four days before I'm about to fly to the midwest to judge an advertising award show.

With such a long-ass commute one would think I'd be listening to new music, but the problem is my favorite station in L.A. doesn't make it all the way out to the destination. So I end up just listening to Sirius XM which is even worse than terrestrial radio.  For one thing, there are dead space pockets where for no discernable reason it will cut out. And we're not talking along a long desolate highway stretch. We're talking on the 405 in El Segundo. So that's strike one. The second strike comes in the form of repetition. So many repeats on so many stations. It's as if someone started a playlist, got distracted and when they came back, figured they were done with it.

This is by no means suggesting that I need to know a third Rupert Holmes song. Escape (The Piña Colada Song) and its obvious formular knock-off "Answering Machine," is probably it. On the subject of Steely Dan, I could go the entire rest of 2019 without hearing "Peg," and I'd be fine.

This is true of all the stations more or less. Even First Wave which is all the new wave stuff, chooses to hide the more interesting dark wave hour late into Sunday night.

But at this point commute music has become a half-paid-attention to background soundtrack. It's interesting how certain songs that hold so much meaning can become aural wallpaper. But the opposite is just as true. Give it enought ime to cool off, come back and you discover it all over again.

One song I do keep coming back to was written by a Twitter friend down in San Diego called Diana Death. If there is any justice in this world, "Creep," would be blasting from every young punk's basement/bedroom/garage/car. Plus her fucking nasty ass guitar solo at the 1:30 mark is sick.

The reason I titled this post "Organ Grind at the Funeral Parlor," besides the fact it sounds like a good song title, is that Diana Death worked in a funeral parlor and used to play the organ between breaks. There might be a story in there somewhere.

I had more to say. But it'll have to wait. I have a small window where the daily commute is rated "Acceptably Long." After that it becomes "Fuck this is long," long and even "Maybe I should rent a hotel for the night," long.