(Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd) (Lynyrd Skynyrd, 1973)

Before you ask me how I did all of the diacritics in the title, let me tell you that cut and paste is probably the greatest feature ever created for computers. You can thank some OCD person doing free work for the Wikimedia Foundation for the real hard work in that.

Pronounced is the first, and probably best, Skynyrd album. That's my advice to anyone wondering what album they should get. Second Helping and Street Survivors are also worthwhile. The others don't really do a lot for me. It's a fairly well-known fact that the band is roughly named after their gym teacher, one Leonard Skinner, so the title of the first album really rubs it in that they were lampooning the guy and wanted to be sure the public pronounced the name just right. For what it's worth, the band and the man buried the hatchet in later years, and Skinner may have gotten the last laugh by outliving almost every original member of the band (he died in 2010).

The lineup evolved through the decade, so this album sports a different cast than any of the other albums, mainly because of the unusual appearance and role of guitarist Ed King on bass. I say unusual because he was the outsider of the band, a California boy formerly from the Strawberry Alarm Clock (yes, the "Incense and Peppermints" band). Also, as is well documented by the rest of the band, he really wasn't cut out to play bass, but with the sudden departure of Leon Wilkeson, he boldly took over the role for one album. Wilkeson would soon realize what an ill-timed decision leaving the band was and return for the next album, moving King back to guitar and officially creating Lynyrd Skynyrd's signature three-guitar sound.

Maybe understated here is the contribution of Al Kooper to many of the tracks. I usually don't think of a Southern band with a "hard as nails" reputation of putting a mellotron to good use, especially when they had a perfectly good keyboardist already in Billy Powell, but he really adds another layer to the music, making "Tuesday's Gone" and "Free Bird" shine.

I know a lot gets made about the devastating copter crash that effectively ended the band as a serious recording entity, but of everyone here, only singer Ronnie Van Zant was killed in the incident. The rest of band all died later: Allen Collins (pneumonia, 1990), Wilkeson (natural causes, 2001), Powell (heart attack, 2009), and drummer Bob Burns (car crash, 2015). Ed King and Gary Rossington are still around, but only Rossington still actively associates with the band.

Bad Religion (Ross Douthat, 2012)

In this day and age, with about 500 all-news channels catering to every political leaning, people often don't read books that don't match their beliefs. I am guilty of this quite often, but it is also hard to open up to other viewpoints when the books themselves too often are shoddy partisan hit-pieces. So, opening up to Bad Religion was a real experience for me.

Bad Religion crossed my radar twice: through an appearance by the author on the Bill Maher show, and an article by the author shared with me by a friend. For some reason this led me to believe that the author was liberal-minded, but it quickly became clear that Douthat is a conservative-leaning Catholic and I was going to be challenged.

The good news here is that Douthat makes his viewpoints clear and argues rationally. This is not one of those election-year Regnery books that makes heaps of unsubstantiated claims against whatever Democrat is running for president. The premise is that religion in the United States has, in a few different ways, lost its connection with the American people that it enjoyed comfortably until the mid-1960's. Douthat uses the classic tripartite approach: the "accommodation" of the Mainline Protestants, contributing to their dwindling numbers; the "resistance" of the Evangelical Protestants, which subjects them to the follies of fundamentalism; and the "Catholic Civil War" that has been raging on-and-off in various parts of the world since Vatican II between reformers and traditionalists. All of these phenomenon have served to increase the secular share of society. However, the secular world is not atheist. They too yearn for spirituality, and they are getting it from some pretty weird places: Eat Pray Love, "Mad Money", Joel Osteen, Oprah, the "historical Jesus" people, etc. And therein lies the "bad religion" of which Douthat speaks.

Although this book deeply intrigued me, I can't say that I ate up Douthat's thesis without reservations. Though I'm no fan of the whole "spiritual, but not religious" angle, I think that one can live a faithful life in religion and still be curious and questioning about the origins of Christianity and drawing distinctions between the "historical Jesus" and the Jesus formed from the Gospels and Pauline literature. Nevertheless, I encourage everyone to read this book and decide for themselves how religion can comfortably serve a meaningful role in modern American society, as well as balance our faith with our natural curiosity for the historical truth.

Brave New World (Steve Miller Band, 1969)

Steve Miller broke his neck in 1971 and was a changed man. This is the only way I can explain how an album like this could be the work of the same guy who gave us feel-good classic rock hits like "The Joker" and "Take the Money and Run". Whereas those songs are breezy and lightweight, early Steve Miller is a good deal more complex. I'd probably heard "Space Cowboy" here and there through the years, but my first proper introduction to this album was its appearance in the fabled Classic Midnight Album spot on K-Fox back when I was in high school.

1969 is the sweet spot of space rock, with the not-so-obvious participants in the movement. Steve Miller wasn't the only one to start his album with a blast-off sound effect. Witness the Moody Blues' To Our Children's Children's Children of the same year, extolling the same whimsy optimism of the post-moon landing era in the echoes of a launchpad roar. It was the year that birthed Hawkwind, too. It seemed like everyone was getting on the space train, only to promptly get off it the next year, except for the self-avowed space rockers (Hawkwind, UFO, etc. and so forth). Even Steve Miller was looking for the exit probably somewhere in mid-recording of the album, which is includes a few frisky blues workout numbers and pastoral odes.

The big selling point of the third Steve Miller Band album, which I feel falls a little short of Children of the Future and Sailor (and not because of the absence of Boz Skaggs), is the "special surprise guest" Paul McCartney, who figures prominently on the final track, "My Dark Hour" and apparently on "Celebration Song". Of course, Paul was still with the Beatles, so if all you had to go by was the LP sleeve, then you would be thinking, "For Paul Ramon of Liverpool....opportunity knocks!" (apologies to George Harrison for that one). Other than recycling the riff for "Fly Like an Eagle" in 1976, this collaboration remained dormant until Miller resurfaced on Paul's 1997 solo album Flaming Pie.

I picked my way through the rest of the Steve Miller Band catalog, and, unless you measure strictly in dollars, things just didn't improve over the years. The band went into a serious tailspin in the early 1970's (and the broken neck was just the beginning!) before being reinvented as a classic rock cornerstone. I couldn't name a single song after "Abracadabra" (1983), however, as the band plunged into obscurity and (probably) county fairs. I guess not everyone can be the Rolling Stones, but even that band hasn't given us an album, let alone a really good one, in over 10 years.

By the way, a big congratulations to Steve Miller for his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (formerly the "Hall of Lame", but with Deep Purple's induction all is forgiven)! I'm sure in April there will be a lot of rocking out to the aforementioned staples of classic rock, but maybe we can get a little "Space Cowboy" or "Living in the USA" slipped into the setlist just to keep things interesting.

Cicero (Anthony Everitt, 2001)

I've had an "Everitt trio" on my to-read list for a while now, all the result of reading The Rise of Rome earlier in the year. The plan was to knock them all out chronologically: Cicero, Augustus, and Hadrian, but I opted to defer Augustus in light of the new biography by Adrian Goldsworthy. Look for that book and Hadrian in, God willing, 2016.

Ironically, the biggest chunk of Cicero knowledge I have comes from his presence in the extensive Gordianus the Finder series by Steven Saylor. Saylor and Everitt are both of a like mind on Cicero: brilliant, but arrogant. Purely by accident, Cicero lived through one of the most turbulent periods of Roman history in the Republican era. While he did not live to see Octavian/Augustus launch the empire, he was around all the key figures of the era: Sulla, Marius, Cato the Younger, Clodius, Catalina, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar, and Mark Antony. Although not a raging optimate like Cato, Cicero spent most of his career (political and legal) battling the more fringe-leaning figures of the populares, the rival faction. In fact, his obsessions with hotheads like Catalina and Clodius probably kept his eyes off the ones that really rocked the system: Julius Caesar and his grandnephew/adopted son Octavian.

Reading books about this time period inevitably make you wonder if we are living in a modern parallel. Although a certain pachyderm-esque poltical persuasion seems to think Obama is the anti-Christ, there are a lot of key differences. I think the big one is the lack of a cohesive political structure. Since there was no legal equivalent of a written constitution, it left things open to heavy interpretation. Of course, the office of Dictator left an especially delicious loophole for any aspiring tyrant, and it is a minor miracle that nobody until Sulla, 400 years after the establishment of the Republic, thought of distorting the limits to achieving his goals.

Coupled with The Rise of Rome, Cicero serves as a good chronicle of the continuing story of Rome as told by Anthony Everitt, with not too much overlap. The earlier book is mainly concerned with the pre-Gracchi period and sort of gallops through the later years covered here. I'm looking forward to continuing the story, although through other authors (Tom Holland, Goldsworthy) initially.

Live at Kelvin Hall (The Kinks, 1967)

First, a blog update of sorts. As one can plainly tell from the ever-dwindling content here, my heart has sort of wandered away from the project. I've got some ideas for 2016 to refresh things a little, but clearly I can't keep up with the drumbeat I set for myself. Hell, I can't even conceive of how I managed to blog sort-of-daily on albums through 2014. All I can say is shifting priorities, as with everything, are behind the changes. My plan at this point is to finish dialing up the random albums weekly and I'll mop up in 2016. The books will be dealt with as time permits, since I never plan to quit reading and I'm not under any self-imposed timetable (though I try to shoot for one a week, something I've failed to do since 2012!).

But enough of this hand-wringing, let's talk about the Kinks!

Live At Kelvin Hall (released as The Live Kinks in the United States), is one of the earlier fully-live albums. Technically, they were beat to the punch by The Rolling Stones' Got Live If You Want It! (with the amusing alternate title Have You Seen Your Mother LIVE!), which was released a few months earlier, but the that recording was particularly notorious for faking some of the tracks. In that case studio recordings were augmented with canned audience noise. The Kinks weren't entirely innocent here either, but the unusually lo-fi sound strangely plays in their favor. The instrumentation is fairly rough and the audio quality is downright awful in places, but this gives it an air of authenticity. The audience noise is clearly faked in a many if not all places, obviously looping around in jarring fashion. Upon the most recent listen, the vocals seem freakishly close to the studio versions. Now I know that some/many bands can do a masterful job replicating their studio sound on stage, but the rough-and-tumble image of the band doesn't support that the Kinks were such a band, not to mention later genuine live recordings by the band vary moderately from the studio versions. The band enjoyed a good deal of audience participation and general goofing off, which leads me to think that they probably weren't overly concerned about note-perfect replication.

In spite of its groundbreaking status as a live release, Live at Kelvin Hall was a bust. It didn't even see the light of day in the UK until early 1968, a full year after the performance itself. Yet, for Kinks fans it is a wonderful document to have, capturing the band somewhere between two of their most inventive albums, during that strange period of time where they were banished from the United States. Not too far removed from Beatlemania, the "screaming girls" audience is still in command, but the song selection favors the two most recent albums. Only Ray Davies could get an arena full of teeny-boppers to merrily sing along with "Sunny Afternoon" like they were playing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (girls: "I've got a big fat mama trying to break meeeeee!! AAAAAAAAAA!!!!"). With "Waterloo Sunset" and "Village Green Preservation Society" still to come, I can only imagine what future performances had in store for these fans.

Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman, 1996)

I primarily read this as a gateway to learning more about emotional intelligence in work environments. It seems a little crazy to delve into that without approaching the fundamental work first. And Goleman's book is fundamental indeed. Sometimes it gets lumped in with buzzy business and self-help books like Who Moved My Cheese and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and even the very subtitle feels more like a sales pitch than an accurate assessment of what's inside ("why it may matter more than IQ!!!" - exclamation marks added by me).

Goleman works from the inside out, starting with some pretty science-intensive brain structure discussion. It is important to recognize that our "lizard brain" way down deep is the home of emotions, the things that have their origins in survival responses to primitive dangers. In one particularly memorable story, Goleman talks about the man who suddenly found himself in a river. His "deep brain" had detected a danger (a drowning child) and his empathetic response kicked in before even his eyes had registered the situation. In effect, the emotional response was even quicker than the five senses, which connect up in the lofty regions of the cerebral cortex, where higher reasoning functions happen.

Recognizing emotions as they happen are a big part of the book. Anger, for example, when it goes unrecognized, can fuel more anger, causing it to spiral out of the control, and, depending on the situation, the emotion can trigger coldly methodical and frankly evil responses in the higher functioning part of the brain. For example, the anger from being cut off in traffic leading to sophisticated dreams of murdering the offending motorist.

As with many things, recognizing the emotions and managing them (not blocking them) is best learned at an early age. Therefore, Goleman spends a substantial amount of time discussion educational programs to instill emotional intelligence in children which will help them greatly as adults. This is probably where Goleman's heart was (and still is) when he wrote this book. The emotions should not control us, nor should we attempt to block them with every fiber of our being. Learning to acknowledge and contextualize the emotions every "normal" human being experiences is fundamental to how we operate as a civilized society. I cannot recommend this book enough, especially to those seeking to understand themselves from within.