Showing posts with label 1996. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1996. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

50 Years Of MyTunes: 1996

Best Albums:
Nomad ~ Aqua Velvets
Odelay ~ Beck  Favorite song: Jackass
Sublime ~ Sublime

Best Singles:
Pepper ~ Butthole Surfers
1979 ~ Smashing Pumpkins
Real Solution #9 ~ White Zombie

Thursday, July 12, 2012

More Aqua Velvets


From their website:
A fascinating blend of spaghetti western, shimmering psychedelia, pristine surf, latin rhythms, mysterious faraway places, and a tongue-in-cheek dash of lounge. link
Here's a link to my all-time favorite Aqua Velvets song, Summer At Dreampoint

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Chowchilla

Chowchilla 'Busnapper' Wins Release From Prison

The headline took me back to 1996 or so. We used to hang around a beer garden/bar named Zott's up in the hills behind Stanford University. The bar was an amusing diversion and was still filled with Ken Kesey types.  One of the guys we met at Zott's was sort of a permanent house sitter for one of the three guys in prison for the Chowchilla incident. He lived in an apartment above the detached garage/converted stables of the convicted busnapper ringleader parent's estate. The old main house sat on several prime acres of Portola Valley real estate. The name of the guy in prison is in the public record but I don't know if the story of the house/estate is. Apparently all the heirs but him are now dead. So there it sat in 1996, empty. Power and lights had long been shut off.

One Halloween (must have been '96 or '97) we got invited to a party up at the caretaker's. After much consumption of alcohol he took us on a flashlight tour of the old house which was amazing because it had been abandoned completely furnished. This apparently had long been an annual thing--a guided flashlight tour of the "haunted house." Just imagine a scaled down "Downton Abbey" with cobwebs. The coolest thing I remember was a bedroom upstairs--completely furnished--on the wall was a pennant from the 1936 Berlin Olympics showing all the nation's flags--including the Nazi flag. The place was like a time capsule. I'm also pretty sure that that's where the arrests occurred for the kidnappings.

Friday, May 4, 2012

People Start Politics...People Can Stop It


Tony Cody, the actor in that famous commercial, claimed Cherokee heritage. In 1996, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported his Sicilian heritage, but Cody denied it. He lived all his adult life claiming he was American Indian and supported related causes.