Odd Ditties

Six Unusual Items from My Music Collection

Steven Hale
The Riff
Published in
6 min readAug 14, 2024

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Billy Tipton Plays HiFi on Piano, cover photo from Discogs

Matthew Carty’s above article on lists has inspired me to create yet another list myself. Matthew focused on the top 25 albums that he owned. Twenty five is more than my writer’s attention span can handle, so I’m narrowing the focus to six of the more unusual works in my already esoteric collection. In some cases I’ve lost the original (marked with ^ to indicate “gone on to music heaven”), but the memory remains clear and strong (well, maybe not Metal Machine Music).

Most of the music here (except Billy Tipton Plays HiFi on Piano) is on streaming and YouTube. Unusual music is no longer hard to find, but it’s as different as it ever was.

Blue Things, “Orange Rooftop of Your Mind” / “One Hour Cleaners”

Not only early psychedelia, but darn good psychedelia. The guitar on “Orange Rooftop” is up there with Jeff Beck’s raga rock work on “Shapes of Things” and “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.” The flip side “One Hour Cleaners,” is one of the earliest rock songs to deal with psychotherapy (not positively, btw). Guitarist /…

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Steven Hale
The Riff

Music: Discovering the lost and forgotten. Politics: Exposing injustice. Screenwriting: Emotional storytelling.