Sticking with mid-90s underground Hip Hop, this tune will always stick with me. I remember first hearing it on late-night college radio–the NYU show (with Mr. Mayhem & DJ Riz), and the Stretch and Bob Show–a perfect groove record:
…and here is the original.
The Hall of Fame announcement comes at 2 p.m. today. My guess is that Roberto Alomar will make it in. After that, I’ve no idea, though I figure Barry Larkin, Andre Dawson and Bert Blyeleven will all receive considerable support.
Update: Dawson is in. Bert gets 74.2 percent of the vote, Alomar, 73. C’mon.
Over at SI.com, Cliff takes a look at the big Matt Holliday signing:
Even in light of Holliday’s new contract, the Cardinals have very few contractual commitments in the coming years. The only other Cardinal guaranteed more than $1 million beyond 2011 is Kyle Lohse, who will earn just under $12 million in 2012, the final year of his ill-conceived four-year extension, the handiwork of current GM John Mozeliak. Aces Adam Wainwright and Chris Carpenter and All-Star catcher Yadier Molina all have club options for 2012 (for $9 million, $15 million, and $7 million, respectively) with Wainwright having an additional $12 million option for 2013. If all three stay healthy, the Cardinals are unlikely to find better bargains on the open market, but if the team picks up all three options, they’ll have roughly $60 million committed to five players in 2012, and with Pujols a potential $30 million player, they could surpass their 2009 payroll on just six players. That means the Cardinals are either going to have to significantly increase their payroll, pinch pennies everywhere other than first base and left field, or bid goodbye to Pujols after 2011 if not before.
It’s flatly inconceivable that the Cardinals would sacrifice their ability to keep Pujols, who is not only the face of the franchise but the best player in the game and one of the ten greatest hitters of all time, for Holliday, a solid all-around player but one who comes with significant questions about his true level of production given the effects of his home ballparks prior to his arrival in St. Louis. The most likely scenario, really the only one that makes sense, is an increase in payroll. Even with young players such as Colby Rasmus, Brendan Ryan, and David Freese in the starting lineup, with more than $40 million annually committed to just two players, the Cardinals will be hard pressed to field a balanced team and keep team payroll under $100 million.
Willie Mitchell, one of the great music producers of all-time, died yesterday. Mitchell was a trumpet player and a band leader but is most famous for his work with Hi Studios in Memphis, notably his production for singer Al Green.
For more on Mitchell, let me share the following from Peter Guralnick’s seminal study of southern soul music, Sweet Soul Music.
[Mitchell] had mastered the technology of recording, developed his own distinctive bass sound (a Willie Mitchell production is immediately recognizable for its “bottom”), and found in the eight-track, tube-amplified Ampex recorder that Hi already possessed machinery in which he could place an almost mystical belief.
…It has been said that Green in later years would spend more than a hundred hours on a vocal part, putting together, note by burbling note, each little comment and countercomment to elegantly stated melody, and while “Let’s Stay Together” appears to have been assembled a little more spontaneously than that, it conveys the same decorative filigree, the same sort of layered elegance with which Willie Mitchell and Al Green would soon take soul music–real, unabashed, wholehearted soul music–to quiet, luxuriantly appointed places it had never seen before.
“Well, you see, after we had done ‘Tired of Being Alone’ and ‘I Can’t Get Next to You,’ I said, ‘Al, look, we got to soften you up some.’ I said, ‘You got to whisper. You got to cut the lighter music. The melody has got to be good. You got to sing it soft. If we can get the dynamic bottom on it and make some sense with pretty changes, then we going to be there.’ He said, ‘Man, I can’t sing that way. That’s too soft. That ain’t going to sound like no man singing.’ We had the damnedest fights, but I think ‘Let’s Stay Together’ really sold him that I had the right direction for him musically, ’cause, see, all the things I told him turned out to be true. Like ‘Let’s Stay Together’ he didn’t like at all, but when we put it out, it was gold in two weeks. So we softened and softened and softened.
Here’s a little something from Mitchell that will be familiar to the hip hop heads out there:
