Hi hi, friends! It’s another Friday, and another round of FTF for ya. I got a few private messages encouraging me to keep this segment going and I appreciate your support. So, without further ado, here’s another batch of mixed genre tunes I hope you have fun digging into. Cheers, y’all…

Classics IV – “Stormy”

The British Invasion of the 1960s brought some of the most creative, psychedelic, at times bombastic (looking at you, Ray Davies and The Kinks) vibes in music history. Eventually UK artists stopped trying to emulate The Fab Four and sought their own butterscotch and peppermint happy pills. Classics IV had a handful a hits, some low-key and melancholic like “Sunny” and “Traces.” For me, their foot-tapping, note swinging ditties “Spooky” and “Stormy” are where it’s at.

The Clash – “Magnificent Seven,” live, the Tom Snyder Show, 1981

The greatest punk band that ever lived, The Beatles of the genre. Fearless pioneers who pushed all boundaries of what they helped build. Punk bands in their wake chased after reggae, dub and ska elements after The Clash, Madness and The Specials broke the doors wide open. The funk and jive studio cut of “Magnificent Seven” from The Clash’s Sandinista album was an example of their transitional noodling. It was a street-savvy shuck out of the gutters and thrusting their will into the bleeding eyesore that was New York City during the 1970s and early Eighties. When The Clash came on The Tom Snyder Show in 1981, they peeled the paint off the studio with this blistering version screaming of urgency. Their curtain call of “Radio Clash” on the same program did likewise. One of the greatest live performances I’ve ever seen from anyone, bar none.

The Jackson 5 – “I Wanna Be Where You Are”

My son is a huge Michael Jackson fan, considering modern gangsta rap is his primary jam. I eventually surrendered my Jackson 5 greatest hits package to him after he repeatedly asked me as a younger lad to leave it playing in his stereo at bedtime. Some people forget how Michael and his brothers first took the world by storm as a family before he and his sister, Janet, became pop icons. The J5 were everywhere in the Seventies, and my mom did the same for me as a child as I did for my kid. Almost everyone beneath the age 50 has no clue a Jackson 5 cartoon existed, but TJ and I always talk whimsically about that over Sunday morning tea, since that’s when it aired, at least in our neck of the woods. The J5 had one monster hit after another as a unified, funky dancing machine. Yet I think my son and I see eye-to-eye with “I Wanna Be Where You Are” as our mutual favorite Jackson 5 jam.

The Dining Rooms – “Pure and Easy”

Staying stuck in the theme of Six Feet Under the show, this electro chill gem corralled onto the first soundtrack is aural yumminess decked with a slick bossa nova groove turned upside down. It carries a shuffle-slide prompting gentle neck bobbing and a twangy guitar reverb that smacks of sheer coolness. Only one song in the land can outdo the sublime bravado of The Dining Rooms’ “Pure and Easy.” That would be Primal Scream’s “Trainspotting.” Cue either as my official entrance theme.

Anthrax – “Indians”

Thrash icons Anthrax shy from no one when they have something to say. In 1987, they stood tall for our aggrieved Native American brothers and sisters with this speed metal fist in the air against racism, persecution and gross thievery of an entire culture’s right to subsist. The video for “Indians” shook things up and made, at least the heavy metal community, more aware of the tucked-away atrocities befallen of the descendants of proud tribes shoved into quiet pockets of poverty. It also has some of the best moshing footage of the times.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.