XMTastic!

I have had access to XM radio now for the better part of a year. I am loving the merger with Sirius Radio and I will tell you why.

XM has a channel dedicated to Led Zeppelin. Not bad, I like Led Zeppelin, but their concert performances are nothing great, not at all common, and the studio stuff probably turns over a couple of times each week. I have yet to hear live Led Zeppelin on that channel. However, with the merger finally hitting our tuners there is one band channel I am absolutely loving and that The Grateful Dead channel. I am hearing a whole lot of interesting music on that. Tonight for instance, I heard a really neat version of Brown Eyed Woman and a rocking rendition of Big Railroad Blues.

The Grateful Dead were a band much longer than Led Zeppelin so even if we are limited to studio albums there is more music, however, most likely every concert they played is recorded and in my opinion worth listening to. The songs vary from performance to performance, the jams differ, and so on. They would play songs within song within song, and then unwind just as unpredictably. One song they may up-tempo or down tempo (e.g. Friend of the Devil - the version you know is a fairly up-tempo edition, but they often played it down tempo) a song, they may invent new (or more likely forget or mangle) lyrics, songs magically morph from one to the other, one of my greatest thrills is to guess what song is coming up after a jam — listening to the clues.

Plus now I have NFL, before I had Big-Ten and Major League Baseball. Very cool!