Mr. Green is not serene

The weekend squire is back from mowing his lawn, but Mr. Green is not serene. He has a nice new Mac, but is discovering there is more assembly required than anticipated.

The turntable that plugged into the audio port on the 6-year-old Mac? There’s no audio port on the new Mac. The external hard drive that contains all the music for AM, Then FM? That’s a FireWire hard drive and there are no FireWire ports on the new Mac.

So, until such time that I can figure out which patch cords, adapters and third-party hardware will make the new Mac do all the things the old Mac did — your wise counsel is welcome — blogging will proceed in fits and starts. Which pretty much describes how that 6-year-old Mac was running. That it kept crashing while ripping vinyl was the last straw.

Vague disappointment like that is nothing new to those of us who buy records. You always hope for the best, but not every record is going to blow you away.

Last fall, I read this Los Angeles Times story about a covers record being done by Micky Dolenz, the great singer from the Monkees. In it, Dolenz said:

“The whole idea is that this album would be a kind of a scrapbook of my life, from the Monkees days, from before the Monkees and post-Monkees as well.”

That sounded promising. Covers of songs by the Beatles, Three Dog Night, Bread, Chuck Berry, the Archies and the Monkees, along with some originals. I kept an eye out for it, and it turned up in our local indie record store this spring.

So I picked it up, brought it home, popped it in the old Mac … and … you know that feeling. You sit back and listen. You want to like it. You’re trying to like it. The record is pleasant enough, but it’s just not happening.

So it was with “Remember,” that covers record from Micky Dolenz. That said, I like Micky, and some of it is worth hearing.

“Randy Scouse Git,” Micky Dolenz, from “Remember,” 2012. Also available digitally.

Which is kind of interesting because the original version of “Randy Scouse Git,” Micky’s take on his 1967 trip to the UK and the last cut on that year’s “Headquarters” LP, has never been among my favorite Monkees songs. It was a bigger hit in the UK than in the States, perhaps because of its English music hall sound, which wasn’t my cup of tea. This is not that. It’s a moodier, heavier take.

As is the title track, a cover of the Harry Nilsson song. Also worth exploring.

Please visit our other blog, The Midnight Tracker, for more vintage vinyl, one side at a time.