Spending the Night with Alice Cooper

I confess: I've done it often. I've spent many Nights with Alice Cooper. Lest you fear for my moral choices --- or my eternal salvation --- I need to assure you that all those nights were spent on KKFM 98.1, "Colorado's ONLY Real Classic Rock." It's one of the few stations that comes in clearly as I'm driving through Ute Pass west of Colorado Springs. Five nights a week, Alice Cooper regales his listeners with great music and equally great commentary, and on many of those nights, I'm among those listeners.

Thanks to Alice, I'm can actually listen to music radio once again. Normally I give up after the second song because the playlists are so lame. But not Alice's. Not only does he play great and long-forgotten classic rock, he also plays stuff I've never heard before, and it's all good. Oh, and he also plays "lousy requests from mutant listeners."

Some nights he'll do themed segments, like "Same Title, Different Song" or "Songs We Just Don't Understand." This coming Monday is tax-distraction night. The show lasts a full five hours, so there's plenty of time for some Cooperesque storytelling. It airs on about 100 stations in North America and the U.K.

It's a fun show.

Bob Dylan Wins a Well-Deserved Pulitzer

Kudos to the Pulitzer Board for bestowing a special honor on one of my all-time favorite songwriters, Bob Dylan. The "Special Citation" was conferred on Dylan "for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." Those last six words perfectly describe much of Dylan's output over the last --- no, it can't be --- over the last 40-plus years. Is that right? Have I really been listening to his music that long? It never gets old. Never.

Even if you can't take his voice, and many people can't, you'd have a hard time tearing his lyrics apart. Sure, there were some less-than-stellar songs, but most are nothing short of magnificent. It's a pleasure to simply read the lyrics to many of his songs, let alone listen to the recordings.

In the interest of full disclosure --- not that anyone has asked for it --- I hereby confess that I am indeed the very same Marcia Ford who is the co-author, with Dylan fan and scholar Scott Marshall, of Restless Pilgrim: The Spiritual Journey of Bob Dylan. My admiration of Bob Dylan is a well-documented fact --- copyrighted, no less. You can read an excerpt from the book here.

Chillout Music, For Sure

Last winter, while everyone else I knew and didn't know was dreaming of vacationing somewhere in the Caribbean, I was making plans of my own for a springtime holiday across the pond. Not in London or Paris, Rome or Madrid. No, my intended destination was far more exotic: Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland.

I knew a fair amount about Iceland, enough to know I wanted to go there. A house fire disrupted my plans, which were actually never much more than wishful thinking, but I haven't given up hope of vacationing there someday. But now, there's an even greater lure calling me to Iceland, stronger than the glaciers that cover so much of the country.

That lure is the music.

And I don't just mean Björk, although—thanks to my daughter and www.last.fm—I've discovered a lot of her music that I'd never heard before, and I do like it. But my love of Icelandic music lies mainly with the incredible, spiritual sound of a group called Sigur Rós—"victory rose" in Icelandic. That sound is hard to define, so I'll take the easy way out and list some of the tags on last.fm that describe the music: ambient, post-rock, soundscape, electronic—even terms like heavenly, peaceful, dreamy, and the ever-popular and in this case, ironic, "chillout." You can download 11 songs, more than an hour of their distinctive sound, for free on the media page of their website.

Next week, the group is appearing in concert in Miami, a mere four-hour drive from my house, and at a fund-raiser in New York, a mere three-hour flight away. Forget it. I'll hold out and see them in concert in their homeland. Iceland in December? No problem. This could be the year of my dream vacation—on an island just shy of the Arctic Circle.