Posted 5:24 PM by Gene

Shortly after on to Dark Shadows. The imbeciles at Montvale restyled their stores to compete with Whole Foods, meaning dim lighting and all sorts of dark hues and the ceiling painted dark gray. Plus they insist on keeping a few of the lights down to "save energy". No lights at all save energy too, as in alleys. What used to be a tolerable sojourn now gives me the creeps. I complained twice by e-mail to "Great" Atlantic and Pacific and got the usual A & P nothing. Long before the Whole Foods yearning these clowns started playing seventies foreground Muzak. I'm convinced it's a practical joke. Why? The seventies were a time of stagflation. Grocers keep raising their prices. Deflation? Five-ounce tuna cans and three-and-a-half-ounce potato-chip bags say otherwise. So does a chain aping Whole Foods. Even its prices have come down.

And today one of the pieces of doggy doo they played was "Rise" (aka "Music to Rape By"). We all know about Herb Alpert. I have this hunch he's still ashamed of the Brass; and if you ask him I fear he'd say, "'Rise' was one of the few things I ever did that wasn't Muzak." Sorry Herb, it was one of the few things that was. What's more, it's DISCO. Disco was something Bill Veeck burned. (And I learn today from the Wiki wanks that in the UK they played the "song" too fast, and nobody noticed.) I shouldn't be hard on Herb Alpert. At his best he played truly delightful and melodious music, but it disappeared from the radio when the act did because it wasn't ROCK. The recent attempt at a virtual Brass revival failed thusly and also because there's no one to concertize. (Lately Herb did a brief tour as a jazz elder statesman at several clubs and hardly anyone noticed.) One must feel guilty about liking the TJB. I don't.