iPod Blues

I got my iPod for Christmas, and it was good.

I bought a bunch of music and loaded it, and it was good.

I bought a bunch more music, and it was still good.

I bought more music yet, and suddenly the bottom fell out.

My iPod will hold two gigs, but I've got way more music on my computer than will fit on my iPod. And it seems that every time I try to remove music from my iPod, it ends up removing it from my computer too. No, I scream, I merely want to remove the song from the iPod but I want to keep the master on my hard drive! Okie-dokie, it says, and it goes on to delete everything off my iPod. Seriously.

Examination of the current contents of my iPod will reveal that it consists mainly of Bowling For Soup and death metal. This isn't a good combination. It's like mixing Clorox and ammonia and releasing chlorine gas, or mixing Ipecac and lukewarm pork roast and releasing nausea rays. But I don't want to take either off. I like Bowling For Soup, and I like death metal. So my theory is that if I could slip some buffer material into the mix, I could avert the ugly BFS/death metal explosion that is sure to come any day now. And when I get a bigger iPod, which could be as early as this afternoon, that's what'll happen.

But what filler material? What do I like other than Bowling For Soup and death metal? How about this list:

Pink Floyd, The Wall. The whole album, please, but particularly Comfortably Numb, Run Like Hell and Young Lust.

Bruce Springteen. I like a good deal of Springsteen - Dancing in the Dark, The River, Born to Run, I'm On Fire, and so forth. He also performed a song for Liveaid (I think) that I heard on the radio and thought was truly breathtaking, but I can't find it anywhere. I think it was called "Trapped" but I could be wrong.

Robin Trower. Trower is probably an acquired taste, being a very bluesy sort of English blues, but it was Big Stuff for me when I was in junior high and high school. Here, we're looking at songs like Bridge of Sighs, Too Rolling Stoned, Little Bit of Sympathy and, frankly, almost all of the Bridge of Sighs album. My absolute favorite, Twice Removed from Yesterday, is not available on iTunes.

David Bowie - how can one argue with Heroes, Suffragette City, Changes, or even Let's Dance?

Uriah Heep. Oh, them were the days, playing Dungeons & Dragons while listening to Demons and Wizards over and over and over and over, with pauses every now and then to listen to The Magician's Birthday.

Blue Oyster Cult, another one of my "formative bands". A lot of early BOC hasn't aged particularly well with me, but there's still something fresh and cool about Transmaniacon MC and Then Came The Last Days in May.

Wall of Voodoo, Mexican Radio. How could I not? For I really do feel a hot wind on my shoulder! (The Celtic Frost cover of this is not to be missed, mostly because of its raw gall - no comprende, it's a riddle...)

Ronnie Montrose, Speed of Sound and Territory. Though originally sold as jazz, they're more like instrumental rock, a way Ronnie could show off his impressive guitar skills without having to actually write any lyrics or pay a singer. Not all of it is all that great, but it's generally good enough one can live with the clunkers.

Eddie Money, Gimme Some Water. Most Eddie Money hits me in the "that's not bad" zone, but I greatly like the song Gimme Some Water, perhaps because of its Old West associations and perhaps not.

Thin Lizzy, Cowboy Song. This works on me about the same way Gimme Some Water does. Thin Lizzy is neither here nor there for the most part for me, but Cowboy Song stands head and shoulders above the Thin Lizzy ouevre and I happen to like it a lot.

Deep Purple, Highway Star and nothing else, please. None of that dull Smoke on the Water business, thank you very much.

Billy Joel, We Didn't Start The Fire. Yeah, I know, it's kitschy and silly and all, but by damn I like that song.

The Vapors, Turning Japanese. On top of being a cheeky joke about masturbation, it's a darn fun song to listen to.

And lastly, Billy Thorpe, Children of the Sun. This album has a bad reputation among some, since it's both in some ways crushingly naive and in others stupefyingly pretentious, but I like it. East of Eden's Gate and The Beginning are particularly good, I think.

And on that note, I'm going to either to get my damned iPod or stop torturing myself. Thank you.