Im doin fine

I wrote this song - gonna send it to willie nelson Im doin fine------------- C C7 Well my folks they're from your town F Havent seen them in a while C D7 G Ive been here sittin on this front porch C Well if you can give them a word F And it aint very long C G C Wont you tell em im doin fine I aint got much money But I got plenty of time My friends they've all moved up the line Dont know if Ill see them again Maybe one day soon Wont you tell em im doin fine My baby shes gone She went up to tupelo But I know she'll be back in a while Until then, Ill be singin in the shade Wont you tell em im doin fine Well the moon it cradles me And the night sky is all mine And the stars they light my way And the sweet rain falls on me And that old dog keeps me company Wont you tell em im doin fine

Where you were going

D G D
Didn’t you see the world from your window
D G D
Didnt you hear the sound from above
G Em
Didn’t you know
G Em D
Didn’t you know where you were going

Didn’t you see the sign on the corner
Didn’t you hear the word on the street
Didn’t you know
Didn’t you know where you were going

Written by Owen Martin 15.05.10

I got mixed up confusion Man, it's a-killin' me

"Eh, ah, if I said dat de lodgements were from my salary alone, I, eh, ah, hadnt intended to, eh, give de impression that de lodgements were, eh, from just my salary. If I said I didnt receive any, eh, sterling payments, I, eh, hadnt actually intended to give de impression dat I didnt receive any sterling at all. In fact, eh, ah, I had actually received some sterling from a friend in de nort, which, I, eh, ah, paid back yesterday, in fact, eh.

Paddys Day

Another paddys day is upon us. For those interested, Alcoholics Anonymous are holding their AGMs in pubs around the country today.


What with ireland facing a downturn in the economy, the irish times have published a guide on the art of thrift
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/magazine/2008/0315/1205104777567.html

teaching an old dog new tricks?

keeping your head above water

in a few years time, when all the ice in the poles melt, ireland will be under water. i got into a time machine today to see what it will be like and it doesnt look too good. well, at least the spire is been put to good use as a lighthouse. i caught up with a senior fianna fail minister to get his reaction to this sea-change and the impact it will have on Irelands's economy:






"I see no cause for alarm. I completely disagree that we are under water. The papers are making a mountain out of a molehill. Our policies on tackling global warming have been successful and we will see them through to their completion in 2800. As we have said, Ireland will never go under water, at least not when we are in power...Now, where's my private boat...."

i talked to god on the telephone

does god talk to you? does mother mary pop in for a cuppa every now and then? a strange phenomenon happened to christina gallagher of achill island some time ago when our lady popped in for a chat one day. an even stranger thing happened sometime later when gallagher bought a few mansions in dublin....

Thor (the real God and the only God. ) visited me today in my teapot. he warned against the impending doom that will befall all humankind if they dont start following him (again). donations to the cause can be made into my bank account. (email for details).

those in doubt about who the real god is should consider this:

what a cool mutherfucker, right? and instead of sitting on his ass all day reading mail, Thor actually goes out and does stuff like sending large bolts of lightning up demon's arses. Any demons that get too close get their heads crushed by his sacred hammer. Let us give thanks and praise to Thor almighty.

May Thor go with you...

the name of the game

wanna be famous? wanna be someone? get this book, then. for those who havent finished reading it yet ill do a short summary of the main points:

1. be a cunt

2. be a cunt

3. whore yourself

4. get a stylist

5. get another stylist

6. any publicity is good publicity. so get your manager to phone

the editor of the star or the sun and strike up a deal.

7. nick as many songs as you can. loads of other talented and

talentless guys wanna make money off you too.

8. look like a plonker

9. be a cunt

10. whore yourself

proof going on a diet doesnt work

"dunno bout you guys, but the McDs here sure are tasty"

reeperbahn 3

the beatles are exerting their domination by this stage. they play the fats waller classic your feets too big. now fats was good but the beatles are doing the definitive version here. macca's voice was never better. the middle bit "bah do bah dop do dah" was just a small bit in the original but macca makes it the best bit. he would remember things like this later eg the coda in ticket to ride, hala haloa in hello goodbye (tho this may be lennons idea) and at the end of cry baby cry (can you take me back where i came from). sort of little kiss-offs that only the beatles could do.

next lennon takes to the microphone for what sounds like twist and shout. however this is arthur alexander's "where have you been all my life". lennon was listening intently to this guy and its no wonder. the guy is a genius although pretty much unheard of. like anna (go to him) lennon's voice is really suited to this. like all the backing here, harrison's guitar fills and licks (which arent in the original) really add to the song. similar crucial licks would appear a few months later when the beatles were working on "she loves you". during these fills lennon can be heard "where you been brother"

paul? - oooh we're gonna hurry?

beatles at the reeperbahn 2

lennon lets rip into a crashing sweet sixteen.

john - "sweet little sixteen". sounds like "la rube"? or maybe "for ruby"?

to begin with, the beatles were always a great cover band. even if they didnt write their own stuff they would probably still have been the biggest band in liverpool. perhaps, thirsty for stardom, they would have released "how do you do it" as their first single. maybe taking whatever songs came their way. because they were better singers than most of the other bands (billy j, pacemakers, freddie etc) they would have got the better songs. they kept on playing shows in hamburg becoming huge in germany and europe due to their rock n roll style. anyway...

straight into the carl perkins number "lend me your comb". you can hear the 3 part harmony here. they would go on to record this one later in 64 but it failed to get on an album.

after that

paul - "afa sound? (german?) " "thank you very much indeed, thank you. Your Feets Too Big"

beatles at the reeperbahn

in december 62 the beatles played their final few gigs in hamburg. a month earlier they had recorded 2 of their own compositions - please please me and ask me why. please please me would be released as their second single in the UK 11 days after their final hamburg gig on december 31st.

luckily enough somebody recorded one of these gigs which was released as the live at the star club lp. the quality is poor but the songs are great. one can only wonder what it would be like if it had been recorded with good equipment.

strangely enough, the beatles didnt perform please please me but did do the other song they recorded in november - ask me why. its an interesting choice - not to play your forthcoming single. perhaps epstein told them not to play it until it was released.

the songs on this are great. almost all of them are covers. these songs were like the beatles training ground as future songwriters. a full tracklisting along with the original performers, can be seen here - http://www.jpgr.co.uk/bls5560.html. info on the four omitted there are:

Where Have You Been All My Life - Arthur Alexander
Sheila - Tommy Roe
I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Cry Over You - Elvis
Till There Was You - Peggy Lee

the unreleased song - My Girl Is Red Hot could well be a ronnie hawkins or carroll bros tune. of course, this is probably the same tune with ronnie covering the carroll bros one.

the first 5 songs are standard rock n roll fare. its not till the end of the 4th song - hippy hippy shake that we hear some on stage banter. it sounds like:

john: thats a good tune!
paul: thank you my son. thank you masumba?

hard to make out. could be german either? the beatles were probably pissed by this stage. i will be trying to make out what they say in between songs for the next few days - a sort of historic document before all hell broke lose - beatlemania...

well actully its just a beatle dork thing but anyway...

bear grilled

on this blogspot we like to keep one step ahead of the pack

http://owenmartin.blogspot.com/2007/05/bear-necessities.html

earlier this week bear grylls was exposed as a fake.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=474866&in_page_id=1770


as a medium, television is becoming worse everyday. the shows are either set-ups, boring, depressing or operations on someone's stomach.

Anyway, now Channel 4 are considering issuing a disclaimer before each programme "stating that Grylls receives help from survival experts and health and safety officers."

Somehow, that aint good enough. How about:
certain dangerous situations are faked in this programme to ensure the safety of bear and the crew. The island that bear is stranded on contains a five star hotel. Grylls is not alone, per se, some survival experts and safety officers help him out a bit."

all tv needs is a bit more integrity.

Possible Dylan Album

1. Tell Me Momma
2. She's Your Lover Now
3. Positively 4th Street
4. California
5. I Wanna Be Your Lover
6. I'll Keep It With Mine
7. Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence
8. Can You Please Crawl out your Window?
9. Love Is Just a Four Letter Word
10. Farewell Angelina

Well Ive just been listening to this quite a bit and i have to say its a pretty great listen. It would be very much a lyrical tour-de-force, like the end of BIABH. I had to leave out love is just a four letter word coz joanie's singing didnt fit in well at all. Unfortunately, there are no known recordings of this song by dylan. Anyway, it works great - you've got dylan joking around on some tracks too which is always a bonus. And as Paolo says in the comments the new Dylan Box-set is a waste. So maybe, instead of re-buying the same old songs, you could play around with them like this..

The Lost Single

Great singles that were not on albums are a thing of the past. Only the great show-offs could really do it. You could include B-Sides too - in that case Oasis were the last band able to do it. But in terms of great A-Sides that were not on albums you'd probably have to go back to The Jam for the most recent group. Nowadays, the purpose of a single is to promote an album. Back in the old days you were expected to produce new product every few months. Anyway on to the (preliminary) list:

Bob Dylan - Things Have Changed
Bob Dylan - Positively 4th Street
Bob Dylan - Can you please crawl out your window? (B-side)
The Jam - Going Underground
The Jam - Butterfly Collector (B-Side)
Oasis - Masterplan (B-Side)
Beatles - She Loves You
Beatles - I Want to Hold Your Hand
Beatles - This Boy (B-Side)
Beatles - Hey Jude
Beatles - Dont Let Me Down (B-Side)
Beatles - Rain (B-Side)
Beatles - Strawberry Fields
Beatles - Penny Lane
Beatles - Daytripper
Beatles - We Can Work It Out
Beatles - Ballad Of John & Yoko
The Who - Substitute
The Who - Pictures of Lily
The Who - Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere
The Who - Can't Explain
The Who - I'm A Boy
The Who - Happy Jack
The Who - The Seeker
The Who - Magic Bus
Rolling Stones - Jumping Jack Flash
Rolling Stones - 19th Nervous Breakdown
Rolling Stones - Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?
The Kinks - Dead End Street
The Kinks - Berkeley Mews (B-Side)
The Kinks - See My Friends
The Kinks - Days
The Kinks - Autumn Almanac
The Kinks - Wonderboy
The Kinks - Polly (B-Side)
The Clash - (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais (released on belated US album)

Of course, its all a matter of taste. you could easily pick 5 or 6 more from the beatles, for example. These are just songs I can think of at the moment. There are probably plenty more. As can be seen from this list, the single was the most important thing in the pre-Sgt Pepper era and then that album kind of changed things. As Paul Weller said recently "You'd never get away with that now"

if there's an original thought out there....

bob dylan once said "The world don't need any more songs"(1991)* and he probably had a point. there's a song about everything...well, just about everything. so maybe he came to this conclusion sometime around the Oh Mercy and Under the Red Sky albums. Afterall, he released no original work for 6 years after that interview. An album that was his last real statement - on aging and mortality of course.

After Time Out of Mind, he released 2 albums which were practically cover albums. Using these old tunes and styles (mainly from the 20's, 30's and 40's) he wrote lyrics which reflected his worldview, old codes of conduct, and themes on love. There are also plenty of quotes and allusions from books such as The Great Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn and Confessions of a Yakuza (released in 91 - is this what bob spent his time studying for the next few years instead of writing songs?). There are also plenty of re-arranged lines from the poetry of Henry Timrod in there. I dont buy the argument that these lines slipped into bob's songs unconsciously. Bob probably marked out lines from these works that he liked and incorporated them into the songs.

The desire to write new songs is gone, but bob dylan now is like some out of time crooner from the 30's in a world that has moved on - a time when bing crosby regularly topped the charts. It's hard to imagine a similar singer regularly topping the charts today. But Bob has moved full circle. When he was just a young kid in new york he used to say in interviews "I had to write these songs simply because nobody else had and these were the kind of songs i wanted to sing"

*http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/1991zollo.htm

Harry Potter! OMG!

OMG! the new harry potter book is out! OMFG!!!

so without giving anything away and spoiling it for those who havent finished reading it, ron marries herpies and harry becomes pregnant. gordon gimpweed gets turned into a toad by the evil witch vordbitch. dumbdinger and dubby fall down a cliff but dubby's double chin saves the day. gibblygibb finds the secret potion of eternal everlasting snot and picks his nose happily ever after. Mr.Snitsnatsnob sat on his arse...again...while the dark lords army ran rampant but they were eventually defeated thanks to some cunt sacrificing himself....

you would have thought this wizard and ork crap would have gotten old by now...but alas human nature has a tendancy towards fantasy kind of stuff. great stuff for kids but grown adults wetting their pants for this stuff...im sure a psychologist or philosopher could write some interesting stuff on the appeal of wizards.

Show Me The Money

This guy has a problem. he spends 1000 bucks on hair products every week and twice that amount on facial creams. he is now 50000 bucks in debt. what can he do? call eddie hobbs of course!

enter eddie. "well son, your hair looks great and all and you've got gorgeous skin, but you're in pretty bad debt here. there is a solution however:

stop spending"

"gee, thanks eddie"

"well that is the first important step billy. the next thing you need to do is find another source of income. you're working 39 hours a week bringing in a nice wage but to pay off those debts you're gonna have to find more income. So perhaps, you could work in a pub in the weekends or something like that."

"yeah i could do that"

another good job done by eddie the hobbs.

next week eddie will be helping out patricia in cork with her financial difficulties.

autobiography no.2 - russell brand

Piers Morgan
'This book is like its subject - hot, raunchy, revelatory and irresistible.'

The Daily Star
"an explosive book"



here's russel brand. part of a new generation of comedians who seem to be multi-sexual. im not sure what their sexual preferences are and i dont really care. i think trendo-sexual is a good word. its kinda trendy nowadays to be sleeping with men, women, transexuals, asexuals - just about anything with 2, 3 or 4 or 1 leg(s). or at least pretend you are.



anyway on to the book - hot and raunchy. wow. that makes me want to read it. my dog gets hot and raunchy whenever it meets the nextdoor neighbour dog. i dont want to read a fuckin book about it. since when is a book thats "hot and raunchy" interesting? guess its part of the dumbing down craze.



"revelatory" - what is it going to reveal exactly? let me guess. he had a hard upbringing. he had it tough. made it the hard way. what else? all the people and things hes slept with. my curiosity is killing me.



i decided to check some reviews of the book on amazon from some people who actually decided to buy it. "I laughed out loud at some of the stuff he used to get up - like walking round the streets shouting 'I am telly!'" damn. i am telly. thats about as funny as falling down the niagra falls. what a witty guy. "I also almost cried when I read about his childhood and came away feeling I understood him" the obligatory hard luck story. is there any celebrity out there who hasnt had it tough?



rating - 3/10. the book looks shite but in fairness to the guy i saw him doing stand-up on tv and he had an idea of sending rose west and peter sutcliffe to iraq to clean it up. it made me laugh. so ill give him some marks for that. but his life sounds as interesting as getting malaria.

bear necessities

bear grylls

a true survivor. in one day the man climbed up a 500 feet 180 degrees cliff, swam across the nile, jumped from tree to tree in a 200 mile forest, got chased by a tiger, swam with crocodiles, and got eaten by a whale and digested out through the other end. all with the help of a pen-knife and a camera crew. perhaps his biggest feat though was getting by the channel 4 insurance people.

you have to wonder when he's stuck in some forest somewhere at night eating ants, and the crew are having their bacon butties, does he not feel like having at least a little nibble on some of those tasty sandwiches. and it must get especially hard for him when the tv crew break open a six pack of coors light and he's drinking from the amazon.

the idea of a television programme about someone surviving on their own in some vast wilderness is what could be called an oxymoron.

autobiography #1 - jack osbourne

im starting a series of reviews of a few autobiographys that we, the public are so privileged to be able to read. not that im going to actually read one of them. but anyway...


#1 jack osbourne - 21 years gone






















"'The revealing book lifts the lid on Ozzy's son's unconventional childhood and his recovery from addiction."


so here we have a spoilt git who sits around playing computer games all day. his dad gives him a pile of money and he goes out and blows it on drugs and partys etc. does a little bit too much drugs. mother sends him to an expensive rehab place. where he recuperates by....playing computer games. now he's clean. he beat it. beat his inner demons. we all have so much to learn from jack - make sure you're born to rich parents and you can party all day and then write a book about it and make a few million squid.

rating - 2/10. 2 marks for being ozzy osbourne's son. doesnt give you a right to write a book about it but you have to by default get some marks for it.

if you bought this book kick yourself hard in the nuts. To rectify your mistake go out and buy the "Paranoid" album by black sabbath.

meanwhile here is some ozzy magic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNppqUotW94