iTunes Randoblog

This could be the start of something big...

Here's the deal: I feel like writing something and I'm uninspirable, so I've thought of an idea that at least I find interesting. I'm calling it the iTunes Randoblog and here's how it works (and you can try it at home):

How to Play iTunes Randoblog:
1. If you don't have iTunes, get it and put your music on it.
2. Don't slack while labeling your music. If Guns N Roses is your favorite group, don't have an iTunes full of "GNR" "gunsandroses" "Guns_Roses" or "gunz&rozes." Take pride in your music or you don't get to whirl the iTunes Randoblog.
3. Roll a pair of dice. This does not mean a single die. This means two dice. I'm not sure why, but this is important for some reason.
4. Open your music library in iTunes, set it to "Shuffle." This is definitely the most important part.
5. Click "next song" a number of times equal to the sum of the numbers just rolled on the dice. If you roll a two and a three, hit "next song" five times.
6. Write a stream of consciousness while listening to the song that you have randomly selected. Say whatever the fuck you want about whatever the fuck you want for however [the fuck] long you want. For example, if you randomly select "The Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats and it makes you remember a time that you beat the shit out of your friends at a club because "If your friends don't dance and if they don't dance then they're no friends of [yours]," then write about that... assumedly from prison... if they give you access to dice, a computer with Internet access and relatively well-organized iTunes playlist in prison. Which they probably won't.

Without further ado, I'm going to start this off:

Currently, "Lullaby" by the Cure is playing, although it should make no difference what song you start on. I'm rolling two particularly small dice that are from a really cool five-in-one game board from Pier One that my mom gave me in a care package she once sent me while I was in college. By the way, if you don't have a set that allows you to play checkers, chess, cards, dominoes and backgammon, then you're fucking missing out.

I rolled an eleven. That's "yo" to all you craps players. I think they call it "yo" in craps because seven and eleven sound so much alike and they want to avoid confusion. Damn, I'm smart. After having written this, "Affirmation" by Savage Garden has come on my iTunes. Awesome; now I'm ready. Time to select the winning song; here we go.

And the winner is: "Way to Blue" by Nick Drake.

Nick Drake is one of those artists that I feel really smart and hip and cool for not only knowing but really liking. In fact, I mention Nick Drake, Elvis Costello and Savage Garden together in this very profile, which I assure you is a complete coincidence. Trust me, if I were to cheat at my own game, I would have picked something with more comic potential than Nick Drake.

So, as I was saying, Nick Drake is a singer/songwriter from a far away place called England and, much like the majority of excellent musicians, he died very young. This is where being a Nick Drake fan without actually being cool can get you in trouble because I don't know how he died and that's a pretty standard thing for you to know about a musician you like. Every real Beatles fan, for example, knows that John Lennon was shot outside of the Dakota apartment building in 1980 by Mark David Chapman who was carrying a copy of Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger at the scene of the execution. Every real Hendrix fan knows that Jimi died in 1970 at the age of 27 while partying his ass off in London. And, similarly, every real Elvis fan knows that the King is still alive and working at either a Denny's in Knoxville, Tennessee or an alligator farm in Tallahassee, Florida.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how Nick Drake died. I own the albums Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, Pink Moon and a bunch of demo recordings in a collection called Time Has Told Me that my supercool friend Wendy gave me (she's a musician). In fact, if you were placing odds on which artist I was going to end up writing about, Nick Drake--purely, by the numbers--wouldn't have been a bad bet. All this, and I'm not sure if I'm a real fan without knowing how the man expired.

Nick Drake was a brilliant, haunted, airy-voiced poet who kind of looked like what Jim Morrison might look like if he were more thoughtful or ate more sandwiches and ate fewer drugs. Unfortunately, Jim Morrison never did much thinking and he preferred drugs to sandwiches 90% of the time, so I've provided a picture of Nick Drake here. It's hard to describe a person that you only know from music and lore. Nick Drake was talented and tortured, whimsical and withdrawn. I like to think that if he were born in Los Angeles, Nick Drake would have probably been a surfer who wrote occasionally for a critically-acclaimed yet unpretentious television series, possibly on Showtime. If he were born in Nebraska, he would have been a taciturn farmhand that would have quietly developed a drinking problem out of sympathy for his boozehound friends. If Nick Drake were born from the fires of an atomic bomb, he would have probably been Godzilla, because--as far as I know--Godzilla is the only thing that has ever been created by an atomic bomb. Also, Godzilla was awesome.

I may not know how Nick Drake died, but he writes very good music that, if you haven't listened to it, you should download immediately. You'll recognize some of the music from your favorite pseudo-indy movies and one song from Seinfeld if you dig deep enough or are a big enough Seinfeld fan.

I don't really know why I focused this inaugural iTunes Randoblog on Nick Drake's death rather than his music. That's a lie. I'm reading a book about a guy who visits the spots of rock 'n' roll tragedies in America and this whole blog would have been totally different if I hadn't been reading said book. Still, it is strange that I feel guilty enough about not knowing how one of my favorite musicians died that I've written an entire blog about it and I'm now about to look it up.

Before I do, I'm going to guess: colossal train wreck.

The verdict: OD on antidepressants.

Man... nobody ever dies in colossal train wrecks anymore, especially musicians. It seems they always OD or crash in a plane. By the way, maybe if you're really good at playing guitar or singing or drumming you should stick to booze and avoid the heroine, pills and airplanes. Booze only makes rockers stronger. If you just drink enough to not have room for needles and pills and ride trains instead of planes, I think you've got a formula for rock immortality. That is, a formula for immortality that doesn't involve having to die to achieve it.