Author: jameswharris

The Albums I Didn’t Buy in 1971

by James Wallace Harris, 8/30/21

[The above photograph is the only one I have of myself from 1971.]

I’m old enough that every year I live is also the 50th anniversary of a year I remember. This year, I keep seeing remembrances of 1971, especially lists of albums that claim to be the best of 1971.

This got me to thinking. How many great 1971 albums did I buy when they first came out? Then how many 1971 albums did I buy on LP or CD before switching to streaming music? Then how many albums have I discovered since having streaming music? Finally, how many albums from 1971 do I still need to play? Spotify has turned out to be a wonderful time machine.

It’s kind of overwhelming the number of memorable albums that came out in one year. The number is impressive, and it’s taken me fifty years of listening to find most these albums, and I’m still not done. Thanks to Spotify I’m still at it.

Albums I Bought When They Came Out

These two albums by Marvin Gaye and The Allman Brothers Band are among my lifetime favorites. I’ve never stopped playing them. I’ve bought them on CD, and even got the Fillmore East on SACD, and they are still repackaging those concerts, and I’ve bought them too. One thing that’s very special in my memories, is I got to see the Allman Brothers in concert in 1971 before Duane was killed.

These next three were major albums for me, and I played them for years, but I eventually got tired of them. I did buy them again when CDs came out, and I play them once every couple of years. Most of the albums listed below held my attention for just a short while. Many I only played once. A great record buy was one I’d play for a couple weeks straight. A very good record would hold my attention for days. Maybe the best albums are the ones we keep playing for the rest of our lives.

Back in 1971 I loved going to record stores. I’d usually visit two or three a week. I didn’t have much money then, so I didn’t buy that many albums in the year 1971 – I’d guess less than fifty, and most of those were from earlier years. Mostly I flipped past albums I wished I could buy. I used to have a fantasy of robbing Peaches back in the late 1970s. It was the biggest record store I had ever seen up to that time, maybe since. Having streaming music is like owning the biggest record store ever.

Eventually I did buy over a hundred albums that came out in 1971. I’d love if I could remember when and where for each one, but I can’t. I also wish I could remember those I bought on LPs in the 1970s and early 1980s, and which ones I bought when they were reissued on CDs, but I can’t do that either. Over the years I’ve gotten rid of my LPs, and most of my CDs. Here’s the list of 1971 albums I owned at one time or another. I’ll bolded the albums I still own (I think). I saved about 500 CDs, but I seldom play them. I’ve forgotten what I own. I bought thousands of LPs and CDs, but I moved around a lot, and sold my collections. There are many albums I bought more than once when I got money to rebuild my collection.

Here are the albums from 1971 that I bought after 1971. I’d say most of them were bought before 1980. It’s funny how a year in pop culture can linger. By the way, I got to see many of these acts in concert.

  1. Tapestry – Carole King
  2. L. A. Woman – Doors
  3. Every Picture Tells a Story – Rod Stewart
  4. American Pie – Don McLean
  5. Crazy Horse – Crazy Horse
  6. The Concert for Bangladesh – George Harrison & Friends
  7. 4 Way Street – Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young
  8. Chicago III
  9. Quicksilver – Quicksilver Messenger Service
  10. Bob Dylan’s Great Hits Vol. II – Boy Dylan
  11. Anticipation – Carly Simon
  12. Rough & Ready – The Jeff Beck Group
  13. Byrdmaniax – The Byrds
  14. Farther Along – The Byrds
  15. Electric Warrior – T-Rex
  16. If I Could Only Remember My Name – David Crosby
  17. Santana
  18. The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys – Traffic
  19. 4 Way Street – Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young
  20. Tarkus – Emerson, Lake & Palmer
  21. Runt: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren – Todd Rundgren
  22. Deuce – Rory Gallagher
  23. In Search of Space – Hawkwin
  24. Nantucket Sleighride – Mountain
  25. John Prine – John Prine
  26. Rory Gallagher – Rory Gallagher
  27. America – America
  28. Who’s Next – The Who
  29. Hunky Dory – David Bowie
  30. Aqualung – Jethro Tull
  31. Imagine – John Lennon
  32. Ram – Paul & Linda McCartney
  33. The Yes Album – Yes
  34. Pearl – Janis Joplin
  35. Madman Across the Water – Elton John
  36. The Inner Mountain Flame – The Mahavishnu Orchestra with John McLaughlin
  37. Songs for Beginners – Graham Nash
  38. Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon – James Taylor
  39. Pictures at An Exhibition
  40. The Electric Light Orchestra – Electric Light Orchestra
  41. A Space in Time – Ten Years After
  42. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour – The Moody Blues
  43. Cold Spring Harbor
  44. Little Feat – Little Feat
  45. Deuce – Rory Gallagher
  46. Osibisa – Osibisa
  47. Osibisa – Woyaya
  48. Free Live! – Free
  49. Future Games – Fleetwood Mac
  50. Broken Barricades
  51. Link Wray – Link Wray
  52. Live in Cook County Jail – B. B. King
  53. Gonna Take a Miracle – Laurya Nyro & Labelle
  54. Welcome to the Canteen – Traffic
  55. 11-17-70 – Elton John
  56. All Day Music – War
  57. Music – Carole King
  58. Sittin’ In – Loggins & Messina
  59. Stephen Stills 2 – Stephen Stills
  60. New Riders of the Purple Sage – New Riders of the Purple Sage
  61. Gather Me – Melanie
  62. ZZ Top’s First Album – ZZ Top
  63. A Clockwork Orange – Various Artists
  64. Survival – Grand Funk Railroad
  65. Flying Burrito Brothers – The Flying Burrito Brothers
  66. Bonnie Raitt – Bonnie Raitt
  67. Cahoots – The Band
  68. Album II – Loudon Wainwright III
  69. Other Voices – The Doors
  70. If Not for You – Olivia Newton-John
  71. Linda Ronstadt – Linda Ronstadt
  72. Street Corner Talking – Savoy Brown
  73. Stoney End – Barbra Streisand
  74. Carly Simon – Carly Simon
  75. In The Garden – Gypsy
  76. Barbra Joan Streisand – Barbra Streisand
  77. Thirds – James Gang
  78. Edgar Winter’s White Trash – Edgar Winter’s White Trash
  79. I Don’t Know How to Love Him – Helen Reddy
  80. Leon Russel and the Shelter People – Leon Russell
  81. Moments – Boz Scaggs
  82. Collaboration – Shawn Phillips
  83. Boz Scaggs & Band – Boz Scaggs
  84. Meddle – Pink Floyd
  85. Blue – Joni Mitchell
  86. Teaser and the Firecat – Cat Stevens
  87. The Cry of Love – Jimi Hendrix
  88. White Light – Gene Clark
  89. Carpenters – Carpenters
  90. Weather Report – Weather Report
  91. The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions – Howlin’ Wolf

This puts me just under a hundred albums I remember owning. To trigger my memory I had to look at the list of Top 1000 albums sold in 1971. I’m pretty sure I owned more albums from 1971 because their covers look very familiar. I think I owned them, but I’m not sure, so I’ve added them to the to stream soon list.

Albums Streamed Recently

These are the albums I remember streaming in the past couple of years. I’m sure there were more, but I just don’t remember. Maggot Brain and Pieces of a Man are albums I wished I had discovered in 1971. They are classics. I’ve added them to my most played play list.

  1. Melting Pot – Booker T. & The MG’s
  2. Maggot Brain – Funkadelic
  3. Surf’s Up – The Beach Boys
  4. Nilsson Schmilsson – Harry Nilsson
  5. A Nod is a Good as a Wink… To a Blind Horse – Faces
  6. Coat of Many Colors – Dolly Parton
  7. Black Moses – Isaac Hayes
  8. Shaft – Isaac Hayes
  9. Pieces of a Man – Gil Scott-Heron
  10. Roots – Curtis Mayfield
  11. Al Green Gets Next to You – Al Green
  12. All Day Music – War

Albums I Plan to Stream Soon

  1. Performance Rockin’ The Fillmore – Humble Pie
  2. McDonald and Giles
  3. Man in Black – Johnny Cash
  4. The Bill Evans Album – Bill Evans
  5. Randy Newman Live – Randy Newman
  6. Earth Wind and Fire – Earth Wind & Fire
  7. Yesterday’s Wine – Willie Nelson
  8. Elvis Country (I’m 10,000 Years Old) – Elvis Presley
  9. Where I’m Coming From – Stevie Wonder
  10. The Sun, Moon and Herbs – Dr. John
  11. Live Johnny Winter And – Johnny Winter
  12. Super Bad – James Brown
  13. Distant Light – The Hollies
  14. Wildlife – Mott the Hoople
  15. Sugar – Stanley Turrentine
  16. Church of Anthrax – John Cale & Terry Riley
  17. Nose Roses – Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band
  18. Givin’ It Back – The Isley Brothers
  19. Where’s the Money? – Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks
  20. Nick Drake – Nick Drake
  21. Seven Tears – Golden Earring
  22. Fillmore East – June 1971 – The Mothers
  23. A Message to the People – Buddy Miles
  24. Back to the Roots – John Mayall
  25. Alone at Last – Gary Burton
  26. So Long, Bannatyne – The Guess Who
  27. The Doobie Brothers – The Doobie Brothers
  28. Manna – Bread
  29. Doctor Hook – Dr.Hook and the Medicine Show
  30. Sunwheel Dance – Bruce Cockburn
  31. Patchwork – Bobbie Gentry
  32. Rock Love – Steve Miller Band
  33. Rudy the Fifth – Rick Nelson
  34. Someday We’ll Look Back – Merle Haggard & the Strangers
  35. From the Inside – Poco
  36. Merry Clayton – Merry Clayton
  37. Nancy & Lee Again – Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood
  38. Lovejoy – Albert King
  39. Gypsies, Tramps, & Thieves – Cher
  40. Ruby – Buck Owens & His Buckaroos
  41. Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream – Mason Proffit
  42. Elegy – The Nice
  43. Rita Coolidge – Rita Coolidge
  44. David Bromberg – David Bromberg
  45. Sunfighter – Paul Kantner & Grace Slick
  46. Take Heart – Mimi Farina and Tom Jans
  47. Dave Mason & Cass Elliot – Dave Mason & Cass Elliot
  48. 1969 – Julie Driscoll
  49. Nice Feelin’ – Rita Coolidge
  50. Garden in the City – Melanie
  51. Can I Have My Money Back? – Gerry Rafferty
  52. Me & Bobby McGee – Kris Kristofferson

Lists Used to Remember

JWH

What’s Your Lamborghini?

by James Wallace Harris, 8/24/21

Few of us are exempt from materialistic desires because I don’t know anyone who follows in the footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi. Today’s gurus are the influencers on the internet, those beautiful young people who convince other people to give them money to buy what they can’t have themselves. Most of us don’t feel incomplete without a Lamborghini but we do want something.

I realized what I want is weird. My Lamborghini is old books and magazines, things most people would throw away, or give to Goodwill.

I’d rather have a first edition of I, Robot by Isaac Asimov than a new Ferrari. (Although, if given a Ferrari I could sell it and buy a collection of all Gnome Press first editions, including I, Robot.)

I saw both of these on a Facebook group devoted to collecting old SF/F books. I suppose I could spend my retirement savings to satisfy this book lust, but I won’t.

Just recognizing where my materialism lies an is enlightening self-realization. It doesn’t free me from those desires, but it lets me know just what species of wacky duck I belong to.

So, what’s your Lamborghini?

JWH

CRISPR: Book v. Documentary

by James Wallace Harris, 8/18/21

I’ve been learning about the gene editing tool CRISPR for years in bits and pieces. From reading news and magazines articles I had a vague idea that science had made a tremendous breakthrough, one akin to science fiction imagined in GATTACA and Brave New World. CRISPR/Cas9 will allow us to heal people with inheritable genetic diseases or cure people with conditions caused by defective genes, but more than that, it will allow us to program our own evolutionary developments, and change our reproductive germlines.

I don’t want to try and summarize CRISPR/Cas9 to you in detail because I’m recommending your read The Code Breakers by Walter Isaacson or watching Human Nature. But if you want a quick overview, here’s the Wikipedia entry.

My focus is to compare learning from a book versus a documentary. I’ve already acquired what I would consider rumors about CRISPR via Flipboard and The New York Times. Those are casual, everyday ways to absorb tidbits of information. But what’s the next level up? That depends on the time you’re willing to spend, and the amount of details you wish to digest.

Human Nature (2019) is a 1 hour and 35 minute documentary that’s currently available to Netflix or PBS Documentaries on Amazon subscribers, or to rent or buy from Amazon and other video sources. It’s a superior documentary that quickly covers the background of CRISPR with impressive infographic and animations, while interviewing the major scientists, then moving into the thorny ethical issues of gene editing, before finally wrapping things up by speculating about the future. After watching Human Nature you’ll have a good sense of what CRISPR can do and its science fictional impact on society. The documentary claims CRISPR will change the world more than the internet.

On the other hand, if you want go beyond the Gosh-Wow level, you could read Walter Isaacson’s new book, The Code Breakers. It’s 16 hours and 4 minutes on audio, or 552 pages of reading. The book tells the same story as the documentary but with far more detail. The framing of the book is a semi-biography of Jennifer Doudna, who shared the Nobel Prize with Emmanuelle Charpentier in 2020. Walter Isaacson is noted for his biographies (Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Ben Franklin), and The Code Breakers is sort of a biography of Doudna, at least when it comes to her scientific career.

But The Code Breakers is much more. It’s a history of a technology that has emerged in our lifetime, and a chronicle how scientists work to discover and apply that new technology. We learn about publishing papers, going to conferences, building labs, forming startup companies, and competing for the Nobel Prize. If you loved books like The Double Helix by James Watson, The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg, or The Inflationary Universe by Alan Guth, then you should love this one too. I especially admired how Isaacson’s interviewed the various scientists competing for fame and glory, because he knew that they knew he was giving Doudna the scientific fame over them. Recognizing who came first in a discovery is a challenging piece of detective work that Isaacson pulls off with the skill of a master lawyer working the jury.

What also impressed me was how Isaacson told this complex story. I can’t imagine amassing so much information and then weaving it together into a compelling narrative. I’d love to see a documentary about how Isaacson researches and writes his books.

The Code Breakers will take you much further than the Human Nature regarding how genetic editing history unfolded, but the documentary has its own virtues, especially in compelling visuals. However, I wanted to go even further into learning how CRISPR works. Neither the book nor the documentary gave me the step-by-step concepts of what the lab work was like. Because CRISPR is so damn interesting, I went searching for even more information on YouTube. Both the book and film claims using CRISPR is easy, and that anyone can order educational kits to use the technology. I just couldn’t visualize that.

This short clip gave me more of what I wanted, but it’s still not enough, but I’m going to continue looking for more videos like this one. However, I also found this video about one of the CRISPR kits.

The trouble with wanting to understand even more is I run into the limits of my understanding. I found the 2012 article from Science that’s at the heart of the book. I can read it, and even spot ideas covered in the book and documentary, but 95% lies behind an event horizon of jargon I can’t penetrate. Just look at this one paragraph:

I love popular science books and magazines, but I have to take the working of real science on faith. I don’t like that. I’m hoping to find other books and documentaries that will help me in my quest to visualize how scientists do their work in a step-by-step process. Throughout the book Isaacson wrote about the experiments involved in discovering CRISPR, but I have no mental picture of what they were like.

For example, x-ray crystallography was often mentioned as a vital skill in this lab work. Seeing this video helps me visualize more of the narrative. What I would love is a Ken Burns type documentary, a 10-part series that visually illustrated The Code Breakers.

CRISPR is another example of the positive potential for our future, and another example that validates science. Sure, CRISPR offers all the potential evils of H-Bombs, but it also proves we have great abilities to solve incredibly complex problems.

I feel lucky to have experienced digital revolution, and I’d love to live long enough watch the gene editing revolution unfold. By the time the 2040s and 2050s roll around, society will be transformed again. But then, there will be other transformation happening in the same time frame. Our efforts to slow climate or our failure to do so will reveal another massive transformation. Talk about Future Shock…

JWH

Beyond Ordinary Friendships

by James Wallace Harris, 8/14/21

Lately, I’ve been meditating on the concept of friendship. We all live alone in our heads, spending our entire lives struggling to make contact with others who live alone in their heads. It’s a shame we don’t have telepathy, because we all so badly want to express ourselves. What kind of friendship activities are there that let’s people communicate effectively?

As marvelous as language is, it still fails us most of the time. I’ve been looking back at how well I communicated with different friends at different stages in my life. What worked, and what didn’t, and why.

My first friends should have been my parents, but I was too immature, my father wasn’t around much, and my mother had a philosophy of kids should be seen and not heard. There was definitely a generation gap that didn’t communicate. I did much better with my sister Becky. That’s because we played together.

When we were still rugrats, during the years before school, Becky and I could be thrown in with any kids and we played happily together. But often this was parallel play, or group activities where we didn’t think about what the other kids were thinking. We focused on hitting or catching the ball, or throwing the dice to get the number we needed in Monopoly.

Because my family moved around so much, Becky and I had to make a new set of friends every year or two. Up to junior high, friends were always the kids who lived on our street, or the ones we played with at recess. The activity determined the friendship. Communication was minimal.

Starting with 7th grade, I got good at finding a best friend fast wherever we lived. The key was to seek someone who liked the same games, toys, books, TV shows, movies, and bands I liked and not be shy. This shared interest technique is really the lowest common denominator of friendships.

The dynamics of friendship changed when I started dating. Then it became more about how well I paid attention to her and her interests. Years of dating, over forty years of marriage, and decades of friendships with women has taught me a whole different kind of communication. Not to sound cliché, but this was often about feelings and emotions, a language I was never good at. However, I learned to listen. But relationships were about getting what we wanted by helping someone else get what they wanted, and isn’t that a higher form of communication?

Work brought about another kind of communication. Fitting in and working together towards a common goal is a whole other kind of interaction and relationship. You didn’t have to know or like a person to work well with them, but you did have to know how to cooperate, take orders, or sometimes give them. There is a dynamics to that type of communication that’s not found in personal friendships, or romantic relationships.

Now that I’m retired I think about new types of friendships. When I worked I felt like I had dozens of friends, but nearly all of them disappeared when I quit. Susan and I spend a lot of time at home, especially since the pandemic. I mostly keep up with friends via the telephone. And most of my friends are people I’ve known for more than twenty years. This is back to the level of shared interests.

I have made one new kind of friend in recent years, and that’s internet friends. For example, I work with a guy from South Africa and a guy from Great Britain to run a short story reading group on Facebook. We are building a long distant friendship based on our love of old magazines and anthologies. It keeps us busy, and our group has grown to over five hundred members.

This has got me to wondering. What activities in the last third of life would make for interesting friendships? Of the retired people I know, many of them talk about maintaining old friends because they aren’t making new friends anymore. But don’t we have to make new friends? That’s one reason why I thought moving to The Villages in Florida would be fun. There are thousands of organized activities for retired people.

My friend Linda and I have accidently hit upon a new activity. We call it a two-person book club. We pick a book, then divide it into sections that we can read in a week. Then once a week discuss the section on the phone for an hour or two. This makes me feel much closer to Linda because we’re working on a specific wavelength. We don’t read ahead because we focus only on the ideas in the defined section. This forces us to think about the same things at roughly the same time.

When Mike, Piet, and I were working on a new version of a database about science fiction, I thought having that project put us on a shared wavelength for several weeks. That made for an interesting kind of friendship. I miss having that kind of project now.

This has gotten me to think about other projects or activities that bring me together with the people. For the four years while Trump was president, it created a bond of shared hatred with some friends. That was different. From the 1990s until 2020, I had a several friends I went to the movies with at least once or twice a week. Also before Covid-19 Susan and I were developing a group of friends with game night. Those two bonding activities haven’t been reestablished yet. Susan and I have developed a new connection when we got the cats. Because we don’t have kids, we’re missing out on a lot of social dynamics that some of our friends have.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if there are activities that bring about closer forms of friendship than just shared interests. Ones that promote higher levels of communication. I’m reading The Code Breakers by Walter Isaacson about the scientists competing to make CRISPR into biotech companies. These scientists don’t all like each other, but their work and competition has forced them to communicate at an exceptionally complex levels.

This leads me to see two kinds of friendships. Consumers and creators. Most of the time we communicate with our friends about the things we consume. We’re looking for common interests and loves. But if you’re in a partnership or on a team that’s building something, you don’t have to like the other people, you can even hate them, but you cooperate and communicate at a much higher level of complexity to achieve a common goal. I keep thinking about Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs creating Apple Computers, and John, Paul, George, and Ringo creating The Beatles. I’d say those were two examples that required communication just short of telepathy. I also say that Walter Isaacson achieved an extremely high level of communicating when interviewing people to write The Code Breakers.

I doubt I’ll start a business in my seventies, but I wonder if there’s a project I’d like to start with other people. That could be volunteer work, but I’m thinking along the lines of building something. Maybe something with computers.

JWH

A Bright Vision of a Positive Future

by James Wallace Harris, August 12, 2021

Last night I had an epiphany while watching the NOVA episode entitled “Great Electric Airplane Race” on my Roku PBS channel. It’s available to view online or stream with the PBS channel (but it might require a Passport membership).

The show was overwhelmingly positive about the future, and it conveyed that hope by showing rather than telling. To avert the catastrophes of climate change will require leaving fossil fuels in the ground. That means converting to other forms of energy. Air travel is a big contributor of CO2, but designing electric airplanes has tremendous challenges. The example given was for a Boeing 737. It uses 40,000 pounds of jet fuel, but the weight of the batteries to replace that jet fuel would total 1.2 million pounds. How is it even possible to overcome such a Mt. Everest of a technical obstacle?

The answer is science. The rest of the show was about how science and engineering is actually tackling the problem. Expect a great transformation in the airline industry over the next two decades. One person in the show called it Air Travel 3.0. I had no idea that these inventions were that close to going into production.

And the new technology wasn’t even the most inspiring part of the show. Miles O’Brien interviewed and profiled many entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers who were creating these new aircraft, business plans, and air control systems, and it uplifting to see so many women and minorities in leadership roles. This show proved social progress is happening too.

While I watched this episode I realized it was a vision of how things could be. We could solve our environmental, social, economic, and technical problems if we choose. That is, if we choose to be rational and scientific. This show was practically utopian in its scenes and implications. If you can, watch this episode of NOVA and meditate on what positives each scene suggests.

Of course, this isn’t proof we’ll solve our problems, just a vision of what it would be like if we tried. To succeed we need to overcome denialism. Denialism is holding us back. It’s why the pandemic rages on, it’s why we don’t commit to solving climate change. The denialists are going to destroy us.

The epiphany I had is we will succeed if everyone accepts science. Science is capable of solving our problems. The deniers don’t want to believe that for various philosophical reasons. I’m not sure if it’s possible to convert deniers into scientific believers, but that’s our pivot point between future success and failure.

For my own peace of mind, I’ve got to find more sources of inspiration like this episode of NOVA. Up till now I had given up on the future because I was convinced the deniers will bring us down. Now I want to focus on the doers. If you’re going to bet, especially psychological capital, bet on the winners.

JWH