Greetings from Laurel Canyon!
Glow worms show the path we have to tread / Dreamers, we should be asleep in bed / Moving slowly through the springtime air / Holding moments in the depth of care / Holding moments in the depth of care
Whisper fairy stories ’til they’re real, / Wonder how the night can make us feel / Loving living more with love to stay / Long past sadness that was in our way / Long past sadness that was in our way
This week’s Idelic Hour starts with an acid folk whimper. I saw an old photo a friend posted. A bunch of us as young kids, doing what kids do on summer afternoons. With our Jonah flying the coop to college, I’ve been getting way sentimental. I gotta say, I get the vibe. Am I the only one?
All in all, my listening over “The 250” was as red, white, and blue as I could muster. For me, that meant Chuck Berry. Fuck, for me, Chuck is like Apple Pie.
And as a male adolescent of the time, I could actually relate to the Raspberries in a way that I probably wouldn’t have related to the heartbreaking nostalgia of “September Gurls” or “Thirteen” because I was too young to be nostalgic, and all I wanted to do was go all the way, which was just about the only thing Eric Carmen sang about. He was the Dante Alighieri of Teenage Lust and as such gave voice to every shrieking hormone in my adolescent zit suit.
The Mekons formed in Leeds in 1976 under Jon Langford and Tom Greenhalgh and have outlasted nearly every other band to emerge from that same British punk explosion, shapeshifting through country, folk, dub, and art-punk without ever settling into one shape for long. Before joining, Timms recorded the experimental film score Hangahar with Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks in 1980 and fronted the all-female outfit the Shee Hees.
1. Ronnie is widely credited as having invented the “Sign of the Horns.” Under patent law, you are legally obliged to pay Ronnie 15 cents every time you use it. Per hand.
Miami, FL | This Miami record store helps you recycle old vinyl records: Sweat Records is among 11 independent record stores participating in a new vinyl take-back pilot program launched by Warner Music Group. The vinyl industry has experienced a historic boom in the last few years, with sales breaking $1 billion for the first time since 1983. Nationwide initiatives like Record Store Day, younger generations’ fascination with physical media, and growing digital fatigue have created fertile ground for an industry that once survived thanks to hardcore, punk, and cult rock records to flourish once again with pop and mainstream releases. But what happens to all those old records with deep scratches, dents, or warping that make them unplayable? …Warner Music Group and Sweat Records are 
Franklinville, NJ | Beloved N.J. mall-era music store gets new life as vinyl albums, CDs make a comeback: For many New Jersey shoppers who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, a trip to the mall often meant a stop at Wall to Wall Sound & Video, where rows of records, cassette tapes and later CDs offered hours of browsing and discovery. More than three decades after the regional chain disappeared following a 1990 bankruptcy filing, the Wall to Wall name has returned—this time as 
Released the year punk exploded, High Voltage (the band’s first international release) may as well have been a punk record; the snot quotient’s high enough. But the Aussie lager louts in AC/DC weren’t play-acting nihilists–all they wanted to do was get rich and get laid while sticking their tongues out (just like Angus on the album cover!) at everything (school, parents, jobs, the Twelve Commandments) that stood in their way.
Celebrity Skin was Hole’s third LP, and some prefer its predecessors (1991’s Pretty on the Inside and 1994’s Live Through This) because Celebrity Skin constituted a turn away from post-grunge punk towards a more pop sound. In addition, unlike most of the songs on Hole’s previous efforts, the bulk of the songs on Celebrity Skin were team efforts, with another two being written by guitarist/collaborator Eric Erlandson without Love’s assistance. Finally, Love saw fit to enlist the help of Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy “Ol’ Cueball” Corgan, who gets partial songwriting credits on five of the LP’s twelve tracks.
Toronto, CA | Where a city learns to listen to a record shop: Twenty-five years on, Sonic Boom has become part of Toronto’s listening memory. Walk into Sonic Boom on Spadina with 10 minutes to spare and the store will probably take more than 10 minutes from you. That is part of what it does, and it does it without ceremony. You come through the door with a loose plan, maybe a new release, maybe a used copy you have been half-looking for, maybe only a need to fill the space before the next appointment. The room starts to alter the terms almost at once. You drift downstairs. You turn left when you meant to keep straight. You stop in front of a section you rarely visit and pull out a record you had no thought of buying until 
Coeur d’Alene, ID | After 4 decades in Cd’A, Long Ear’s last day marked by memories, ‘Last Christmas.’ When the doors of the Long Ear closed for the final time at 6 p.m. Friday, when the last sale had been rung up and the last customer had wandered away, Terry and Deon Borchard stood together. They looked at each other, decades of emotion on their faces, and hugged. A friend rushed over with a camera to capture the moment. “
