High Sierra Topix

Any favorites you enjoy listening to while either going in or out from a backpacking
trip?
This year it has been a lot of Jimmy Hendricks (Best of), and Pink Floyd (Dark side of
the Moon) for me, beside the usual R&B/Funk.

For me it is a 5-6 hour drive to most trailheads in the sierra, so I listen to alot of music on the way. Mostly classic rock with some bluegrass or Gaelic Storm thrown in. The last thing I listen to before the trailhead is something that will put a good earworm in my head to "listen" to or sing to myself while I am out there. Last trip it was the Grateful Dead's American Beauty and I had "Ripple" in my head the whole time

Last trip to Yosemite it was Eddie Vedder's soundtrack from "Into the Wild".

My musical tastes are rather varied ranging from classical to jazz to old school funk/soul and hip hop. However, I have tended to go with classics going to the Sierra as this is an old tradition that dates back to my first trips with my dad in the 60's. He generally used a very poor cassette player (separate) plugged into the cigarette lighter in our vehicle, a '66 Suburban. We had an assortment of tapes, but we had a "go to" tape that traditionally was started somewhere around Groveland as we rolled up 120 (from the Bay Area), usually headed for the East Side. The go to tape: It started with Cesar Franck's violin sonata (on the early tape versions I recall this was Francescatti and Casadesus), and included Mendelssohn's Octet (don't recall early version performers, later versions were the Phillips recording by I Musici), and Wagner's Tannhauser Overture and Venusberg music (Ormandy), and Rimsky Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture (Ormandy). From the early 70's to the 90's I inserted the tape so that Franck would get going somewhere around Groveland (a bit before?), but Wagner would kick in at about when we had a view of the Clark Range in the fading evening light (we generally left the Bay Area in the afternoon on getaway day). Sometime in 90's I made my own parallel set and my go-to tape (in my '92 Pathfinder that lacks a CD player but has a built in tape deck) for the last 10 plus years or so has been: Dvorak's Piano Trio Op 65 (Beaux Arts Trio), Schubert Quartet Nr 12 (Quartettsatz; Gabrielli Quartet), Schubert Wanderer Fantasie (Richter), Borodin's Polovotsian Dances (Solti), and Schubert's Lebenssturme (4 hands; Queffelec and Cooper). This is the one I make sure is playing when I hit the true high country during the drive. I was rolling with that one (and the others of my long distance driving set) on my trip to Bridgeport a couple of weeks ago. I like the old favorite, but after my dad passed away in 2000 I didn't think I could handle it if I played that while driving to the Sierra--I would have a very hard time driving though all the tears, given all the great memories that would flood back.

e-books or Classic Radio programs on Sirius.

Maverick- we have similar tastes (it is spelled Hendrix BTW, he grew up in Seattle so we have to know that). We listen to a Hendrix-inspired instrumental Bay Area Surf/psychedelic band called the Mermen (they usually play Santa Cruz/SF and we make a couple of trips down a year to see them). Here is a clip of them from 2001 at Burning Man- kinda spacy. But if we are coming from Seattle (14+ hours) it is books on cd for sure.

a mix of ABBA (i know) and country music, like merle and willy. Maybe some Clint Black. See, i kinda like something i can sing along to if i'm driving, much to the dismay of my travel partners.

Your right MK, I had it spelled right the first time, but I wasn't sure so I checked
and they had this spelling above Jimmy's picture, so I changed it.
Thanks for the link.
GB, what are we talking about here, Funkadelic, Brick, Fatback, Floaters, or
further back like Manhattans, Tyrone Davis, Stylistics, Major Harris era?
I used to DJ 70's Funk Parties, still have about 450 records in crates at the house.

It depends. I am a self certified music nut! My dinning room table has been ommited in favor of a drum set, a handfull of guitars, couple bass guitars, few amps, a couple turntables, and records everywhere. :retard: Grew up on classic rock, liked hip hop as a kid in the late 80s. Discovered punk music in jr high. I quickly grew into a punk snob, almost refusing to even listen to anything made after 1984-85. Still, the punk section of my record collection is 95% pre 84 stuff. Got back into hip hop (more underground stuff, none of that garbage that is made with the sole purpose of getting woman to shake thier a$$'s) a few years ago. Alot of times, I will throw on the Bands "brown album" when our sierra destination is near. Thats one is near and dear as my dad would play it all the time when I was a kid. Every single song on that album is pure gold! (4-5 hours to bishop for me) But the one song that has "stuck" is a song by Illogic, called "Birthright", where he mixes up alot of sounds from a Steve Miller Band song to create the beat. Now everytime I hear that song it litterally takes me right back to the dirt road leading up to North lake.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_i4o72r ... re=related" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

maverick wrote: GB, what are we talking about here, Funkadelic, Brick, Fatback, Floaters, or
further back like Manhattans, Tyrone Davis, Stylistics, Major Harris era?
I used to DJ 70's Funk Parties, still have about 450 records in crates at the house.

P-Funk, Cameo, Confunkshun, Fatback, Brick, Barkays, Earth, Wind & Fire, Gap Band, Slave, Ohio Players, etc. I too have an enormous vinyl collection (the funk section is the largest, but the classics and jazz sections are pretty large). Given that my CD and other media collections have not even remotely caught up, I still pull out the vinyl and play it on occasion. There is a lot of music I just can't get CD or MP3 format.

E,W&F is the favorite among all favorites, though, especially the Phillip Bailey-led ballads. There is a certain extent to which I guess many of us have a time window for our favorite tunes that is tied to a certain time in life (generally a time in our youth). As the title and chorus line of a comparatively little-known and supremely haunting E,W & F ballad goes: "We're living in our own time".