The Now Spinning crew takes a fun musical journey through songs inspired by animals, featuring everything from horses and cows to lions, dogs, and even creatures from video games. Along the way, they share stories behind the music and explore how these tracks connect them, as they celebrate the joy of discovering unique vinyl.

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Website: LCC Vinyl Record Club

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Now Spinning, the official podcast of the Lansing Community College Vinyl Record Club. We meet twice a month to listen to vinyl and talk about music. Stay tuned to learn about how you can get in touch with us and attend our meetings.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back. I'm Simon Medina. I'm your host for today and with. Me I have:

Tyler.

Andy.

And Jacob.

Welcome back to another wonderful episode. Today we are going to be talking about our meeting we had on the 16th of April, and this one, the theme was Animals.

So we have quite a few fun ones today. But, Tyler, why don't you get us started? All right.

The first song that we played was all the King's Horses by the Monkees. It's a good little track. A little fun fact about it is that in an episode, they're trying to like save this horse or something like that.

In the Monkees episode, and it was like, kind of segued in there, you know, plot point and all that. But they had Davey ride this horse like Davy Jones.

Fun stuff.

But just to mention the Animals, the band. The Animals we did play were played.

We couldn't.

We could not find a song that talked about Animals by the Animals. We just found that they're called the Animals.

We, however, unfortunately, we did not get a chance to play the Pink Floyd album, Animals even. But probably for the best is every single one of those songs is like 20 minutes long and it's only like an hour a meeting.

So that would have been like a third of it. Yeah, just say pig Floyd.

We didn't have Eagles either, which is really interesting.

You know, sometimes that just happens. But kind of like the Eagles, the song you were talking about earlier, Chestnut Mare by the Birds.

This is like a late, like late, early 70s song by them. It's a nice song, like, well produced. It's catchy. Like you say it's like a Bob Dylan Eagles thing.

Yes. Yeah, it's.

It's like written about like a horse, but it's very clearly a metaphor for a woman. It's a strange song. He's like spoken word narrating it. I don't understand it. I had to listen to it like a second time.

I was trying to wrap my head around it. It's an interesting piece. I would advise listening to it. This album.

I got to check this whole album out, though, because I think I like the sound of the song. It's a very catchy song.

I don't know. I. I played it off Birds Greatest Hits, Volume 2, I'm pretty sure.

Volume 2, yeah.

Apparently it's like, half live and half studio, apparently, from what I was reading earlier. But I'd have to.

I'd have to check it out. I've never seen it before.

Memorable lyric from it is when Roger McGuinn says. And something spooked just like that, and it's. Oh. Oh. It just makes me cringe just listening to that.

And that was a great. That was greatest hits worthy, I guess.

Yeah. Next up, we've got can't you hear the Cows by the Turtles. This was.

Caused some controversy back in the day, at least amongst, like, the record producers for White Whale, because in the album, the battle of the bands.

Cool album, by the way.

Yeah, it's just like a concept album of the Turtles performing as different bands. And like, this one, they were gonna have, like, cow heads on. And the record companies. Oh, hey, that's a little.

That's a little too, like, distasteful. And so they took it off the album. But it's been released on singles and various other reissues in the future, so that's pretty cool.

Looks like somebody played the barnyard segment from the Beach Boys Smile as well. That's interesting. That was. I mean, like, if any song on there, I guess that's the one that makes sense. Ties the whole meeting concept together. Yeah.

Cow, barnyard, horses, etc.

Yeah.

But sheep.

I mean, we'll talk about that later.

We're getting to it. Yeah, cats, anything like that. But an animal that you will not find in a barnyard is the members of the Bee Gees. I don't think that.

I don't know about that.

This is a weird one. This was bought in by me. Shocker.

Why'd you bring it in?

So, yeah, it's Bee Gees. B E E GS. It's really sappy, but I had to.

There you go.

Just too perfect. And I had the exact same reaction from both Jacob and Tyler. Yeah, the why did you bring this in? Is beachy. Oh, that's weird.

It wasn't just oh, it was oh, followed by, like, a very brief groan.

Yeah.

No, no, no. It was, I do like the Bee Gees. I do like the Bee Gees. So it's. It's fun.

Yeah, they're pretty good. I have to say about them. Their early stuff is pretty underrated. And it's not disco, you know, which usually surprises some people.

Totally different. And then they proceeded invent half of what became disco.

Yeah.

But pretty cool stuff. After that, we had something. Yeah, something completely different.

We had a track from the video game Hollow Knight, the track Hornet, which is a character also in the sequel. But yeah, it's a game about bugs. So there you go. It's animals.

My sister's a huge fan of that game. She plays it all the time. I don't get it all. I have to check.

Yeah.

But, yeah, what the hell. What is Sheep on the Hillside? I don't even know.

I mean, this album from the Collectors, it's called Grass and Wild Strawberries. It's like kind of acid rock and psych pop kind of mixed together. I played it and I said, hey, Adam, you'll probably like this.

And I asked him after, oh, you. You probably like that, right? Yeah, that was pretty good.

So I praise.

It's.

Yeah, it's like time kind of sort of thing, you know, I mean, I can't really play it right now because, you know, we're on the radio.

But check it out.

Definitely check out the Collectors. I'd say they're an underrated group and you don't really hear of them all too much.

I don't think I'm familiar at all.

But bringing it on back to the horse thing. A horse with no name. America. I'm so glad somebody played this one.

Mean, I don't know how you could get away with a meeting like this without playing it. This is one of my favorite songs. This is one of the two songs by America that everybody knows a lot. This one's interesting lyrically.

He's just talking about a horse with no name. He's going through the desert.

There's like plants and birds and birds.

And rocks and things, you know, he sees a riverbed and he gets sad.

About it and then he sets the horse free.

He does.

Yeah.

It's a whole thing. I think there's symbolism layers here that I just do not know. And I'm sure somebody has spent a.

Long time either figuring it out in high school. Has written an entire essay.

Yeah.

Doing a deep dive of the lyrics.

I honestly think it's either me. There's like either really deep symbolism or he was just making stuff up and he's like, they're going to think this is really deep.

Yeah.

The Hotel California problem.

Yeah. Yeah. Except I Don't think a horse with no Name is, like, played as much as Hotel California.

Oh, not even. Not even close. Which is too bad because I love a horse.

But too bad, though, because then we'd be saying, oh, a horse with no name.

I can't imagine overplayed.

It does happen.

Yeah.

But, yeah, fun song. I think now we're gonna take it back to the cow thing. Cattle Call. I'm starting to see, like, a theme. There's, like, three animals so far.

Well, four animals. Five, actually, counting hornets, bees. I guess they're two different things. But back to. Back to cows.

We have a song called Cattle Call by Eddie Arnold and then the song called the Strawberry Roan by Marty Robbins. And I wanted to highlight these because it's like two, like, country waltz things, you know? I mean, like, it's like the three, four time.

Yeah, yeah, I know. We talked about, like, different times and measures. Four, four, meeting. Yeah. Waltzes are very.

Usually piano, but it's really interesting hearing them on guitar. And I think they're kind of Welsh.

Anything was that doubt. Up, up, down, up, up. Staying from, like, the piano down. That's. You can do that in anything. That's just.

We'll get. We'll get back on the waltzes later.

Oh, no, we will.

I forgot about that. I mean, we can talk about it now if you want.

No, let's keep with the country theme.

Keep on rolling.

We got Cattle Call about cows, Strawberry Roan, which is about. It's technically a coat color for a horse.

Okay. Okay, I figured.

Yeah. Next we got the Crippled lion by Michael Nesmith. One of his kind of.

He made very weird titles and stuff, especially during, like, his Nashville sessions and stuff like that. Like, you got Crippled Lion. You've got Carlisle wheeling in the Eclectic Popsicle is. You know, stuff like.

Sure.

But I've talked about Magnetic south enough. It's really good country rock, and I suggest you listen to it. You know, fun stuff.

Yeah. Michael Nesmith, he's also. He's in the Monkeys. I don't know if we've talked. We talked about. In the last episode a little bit.

Yeah, we talked about.

We talked. We talked about the Monkeys a little sometimes.

Yeah.

I want to quickly shout out a song called Walking My Cat Named Dog by Norma Tanega. This is one of my. I love this song a lot. I've heard it a couple times, but I never, like, sat down and listened to it all the way through.

She's a very, very interesting songwriter.

It's like. I think she was like, from one of the people in the Greenwich Village, I believe.

Yeah, sounds like it.

Yeah. Very folky.

Cat named.

Already folky.

And I think that adds another animal to the list here. We had horse. Horse, cows, I think, bees, et cetera.

Are we gonna count cranes?

Yeah. Crane wives. Sure, I'll count it.

I like the crane wives a lot.

Crane wives are nice.

They've been around for a while now and it's all. It's all pretty good.

Yeah, I thought I quite liked it.

Yeah, it was nice as a acoustic Y, little ditty at the end and kind of, you know, kind of vibey.

And now we kind of have two animal related ones. Sort of, kind of tangentially animal related. Why don't we talk about our good friend here, Jacob?

Who?

Moby.

Moby?

I don't know. Is Moby a friend of the show? Probably he'd be.

Well, you played him enough to call him a friend of the show.

So I played the song Feeling so Real. It's a big one of the bigger hits off of his, like, debut album. Great song. Go listen to it.

But why I played it is Moby is a big animal rights activist tattooed down his arms. He has the words animal rights and not small. Like it's on the entirety of his arms. He has the word vegan tattooed across his neck. He's into it.

On the back of the album is just a big long essay about why we should all be vegetarian. And it's been a big focus of his career is like he counts it as like something of his day job. It's like, oh, I'm an animal rights activist.

You know, I make music at night, you know. Sure. And that's. I don't know. It's cool to be so into something. Especially back when that album came out. Everything is Wrong.

When that came out, veganism, vegetarianism was not cool. It's. It was not as accepted as it is now. But yeah.

And interestingly, he's called Moby because his dad gave him the nickname Moby because he thought he was a big kid that looked like a whale. And also apparently, yeah, apparently he's very, very, like distantly related to Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick. And we also.

Andy managed to play the song Moby Dick, which is one of my all time faves.

Yeah, it's on Led Zeppelin 2. Very good album. I just. I just thought on there, like, hey, mommy, Dick, the white whale. I did not know it was just some.

A really good banger for rock song.

Oh, yes.

Greatest no of all. Yes. I'm gonna say it's. It's. It's one of those things when. When they played it live, it was like 30 minutes.

Oh, my God.

I can't imagine this thing.

Yeah. Yeah. It. He would. And apparently what. The drum. Solely we get in there was cut down in the studio. It was even longer. But, yeah, it's just what they.

What they gave us is so solid. It's. And then just like, sandwiched by a, like, the best blues riff. And. Yeah. I. I love Led Zeppelin 2. It's probably my favorite Led Zeppelin album.

But this song in particular is just like. It's everything you want, you know what I mean? In just a simple drum song, you know?

Yeah. But, yeah, Led Zeppelin. Fun. I. I quite like this album, too. It might be, like my second favorite. It's definitely tied with Led Zeppelin 1, 1 and 2.

I kind of. They like in the same zone in my head. Like the blues rock, almost.

Yeah. Where they're basically very jamming, but a jam blues music. And you're like, yeah, awesome. Like, great.

Like crazy. I think that. Going on for, like, half an hour, though. That must be crazy.

Like, you think everybody else just kind of got up and, like, took a break while he's playing the drum.

They literally went. He would be sitting there doing the drum soul, and they'd be like, all right, I'm gonna go get a beer.

Okay.

Bye, guys.

That's awesome. Yeah.

And we. We were gonna follow this with another whale song, right?

Yes. We rounded this out. This song got played before the other two, but it wasn't. It didn't flow as thematically well.

We had Ode to Big Blue by Gordon Lightfoot, which is a folk song written about a blue whale in the ocean. And he talks. I. I just thought it was beautiful. It's a beautiful piece of music. I didn't. I never knew the song existed. Gordon Lightfoot, I've.

Friend of the show.

I've talked about it Don Quixote being, like, a really good album. I remember. I think it was in the desert island theme. Talk about, like, go listen to Don Quixote. It's got a lot of great hits, but I like it.

I like it a lot. I'd say it's probably underrated.

There's not enough folk songs written about legendary whales, I don't think. There's some metal songs written about legendary whales, but not. Not folk songs, unfortunately.

And a very big drum cell about it.

Whale indeed it is.

Yeah.

Rolling along we're taking detour Back to horses again Fleetwood Mac Yeah, here we go again. Fleetwood Mac. Long Gray Mare. This is. I think this is a like an old like blue standard. But this was like very early Fluid Mac.

Who played this one actually? Where'd this come from?

Maybe Tim, maybe. I know sometimes he has like the older.

Yeah, that's this. But this was like the first iteration of Fluid Mac, I'm pretty sure, like back when they were like a straight up legitimate like 100% blues band.

Which is kind of a strange thing. Everybody thinks about Fleetwood Mac, obviously.

You know, everybody has the same mental image of them, you know, like Stevie Nicks, obviously, which cuz they were. That's when they were making hits. They were making.

I love very good music.

But like it's kind of strange to think about how they started out as just being like a very good. I'm not gonna say that they're like one of like a hundred, like British blues band because they were really good. Like they were one of the best ones.

I mean, Peter Green. Shout Out Peter Green, he's great. And then like Mick Fleetwood, the drummer, he was. I mean, he's great. They're all great. But this, I don't know.

They had quite an interesting journey where they ended up. You listen to this and then you listen to like Dreams or you know, any of the other songs off Rumors and you're like, how did we get here?

It's a just a very different kind of song. I don't know.

Yeah, people got to change as they go through their careers.

I hope so.

I'd like through their whole career. Next up, we got Dead Fox by Courtney Barnett. I like Courtney Barnett. I really like a lot of her albums.

I think she just had a new one out like last year. I can only listen to it maybe once or twice, but it was pretty good.

Just kind of that like kind of chill sometimes alternative sound with an occasional heavier tone to just kind of like get you going. Just feeling good.

What was that song called? Sorry, that did not end up Dead Fox Dead.

It's a bit more unusual.

It's got.

It's not as much about.

It mentions a ton of animals too.

Yeah, we get a fox to the list here.

Yeah.

Is somebody keeping a tally here? I feel like we should be keeping a tally.

How many animals?

I don't know how many different kinds of animals we have here.

Well, next we got Dog. Atomic Dog by George Clinton. All I know about the dog related part of this is that Snoop Dogg.

Well, I was going to say, apparently he just walked into the studio drunk and was like I'm going to sing this song about a dog. And they were like, all right. And they played the beat backwards. He sang over it and we're like, that's awesome. It would go on to be a big influence.

Like he said to people like Snoop Dogg, which is very fun.

Yeah, I liked it. Next up, I played Hable Dog. Another dog, two dogs. Yeah. This is featured in Yellow Submarine, which is. It's a great.

It's a very great psychedelic movie.

I still gotta watch that. I'm a fake Beatles fan.

You've never. I used to watch my Yellow Submarine DVD when I was a kid.

I'd say like a ton after, like the big Beatles resurgence, like, you know, in the 90s and stuff like that.

Yeah. Hey, bulldog. This is one of my very favorite Beatles songs. It's such a good one. I do like that part where, like, there's no actual dog on the song.

That's like John Lennon barking, I think. I mean, I don't know. It's one of them yard and the other one's just like yelling at him. Quiet boy. And he just barking. Then it's. I don't know, It's.

It's interesting. They're having fun with it. You can tell they're having a lot of fun.

Yeah.

In the studio. And that's really all you want out of a Beatles song.

I suppose I'm not gonna, like, spoil a film or anything like that, but I think you will maybe will like the scene and the movie that features said song. Maybe, but that's just me.

Shout out the Beatles friends of the show. Check out their music. They were trying to give them a hand.

Yeah.

Moving on up in the world. Then there was a song called like an Animal by a band called the Glove. This was like a weird, like, new wave dancy thing.

I've never heard of this band before, but I'm definitely gonna come back and check it out.

Yeah.

The Glove. That's an interesting name.

Yeah, that is that. Oh, man.

That's why they have the hand, though, the Glove.

Yeah. It literally looks like the dreadful flying glove from Yellow Submarine Marine.

I think it probably is.

Yeah. Probably taking some inspiration, probably.

Did you want to mention Sonic the Hedgehog at all?

I mean, just for everybody else's posterity. Did get played. We had a second video game song in here.

Let's put that hedgehog.

I don't have anything nice to say about Sonic the Hedgehog. No, I'm just. I'm just being. I'm just being.

I got problems. I got problems with them.

Oh, they're. It's fine.

Why are we talking about things that did not make it down the list? Someone played a couple of songs from the Gizzards.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.

And the Lizard Wizard.

I want to talk about their album cover. Their album covers are insane.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Insane. Who was it?

They're true artists.

Definitely.

Yeah.

Was it. We talking about the. The album was like flight B741. That's like their second to last album. Like most recently.

It's like pigs on, like this wooden.

Like wet pigs fly. Yeah.

When a thing.

That's a fun band.

Contraption.

It's a fun album. It's like a.

One of them had like a actual gizzard on it with texture.

You could feel the lizard.

Yeah.

The Petra. Petroderconic Annihilation or something. I gotta find the name of it. Hang on. But that's such a good. That's like. That's an ender thing.

Because those two albums, like B741, that's just like a boogie rock, like classic rock kind of having fun thing. And then Petro Draconic, Apocalypse or Dawn of Eternal Night, Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation.

That is the other album. Or they just call it Petro Draconic is just what people call it. That's still a really long album title. That's like a thrash metal album.

It's awesome.

Oh, it's great.

Yeah, it's awesome. I love that one. That's probably like unironically my favorite King is right there.

It's like top top 10. They have like 500 albums also jumping.

Back like Simon was doing. But we're jumping back and bringing back the waltzes now, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I also played Swan Lake. The waltz from Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky. Classic. The ballet is in fact about a woman that gets turned into a swan. But you know, it's about a swan.

More or less. One of the most famous ballets of all time. Tchaikovsky is a master. This was him introducing Leitmotif into his work.

A lot of the characters in the ballet would have their own theme themes. And this is just a. A really pretty waltz. There's not a lot has to say about it. If you are somehow unfamiliar with Tchaikovsky or ballet.

Go listen to the Swan Lake Waltz. It's very pretty.

You'll probably know it even if you don't know the name of it. I'm terrible with classical music. I could recognize it, but, like, I hear that I can't tell you the name of it. Yeah, it's a lot of stuff.

I feel like there's pretty much everyone. Yeah.

And then, so real quick, Tyler had a record of animal sounds.

Yeah.

And we played ostrich sounds off of it. But we realized right afterwards, oh, we should have played lion sounds. And we played the Lion Sleeps Tonight by the Tokens. Super famous song.

Everybody loves this song. I adore it. But I want to mention that it was originally. The melody was originally by a guy, Solomon Linda, I believe is his name.

He wrote the melody, the wimaway part, as we hear, too. And that eventually made it to America and was. Was like, written into some other songs that the Tokens heard.

And then they were like, we're gonna add some English lyrics to this. And it became just a super mega hit. So they're. They're the ones who introduced the lion. They're the one who introduced the animals to it. But I did.

It's a song famous for the fact that the guy who wrote it didn't get credit for, like, 80 years before somebody finally realized, like, oh, no, it's this. But I love it.

Yeah. Speaking of songs and writing and all this stuff, I also mentioned this in the Desert island podcast is Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear.

I feel like we've talked about this song before.

Yeah. In the Desert island podcast meeting thing with Anna Sophia.

But that was like a week ago. Yeah. Okay. I remember it was.

Well, the reason why songwriters and all that is because it was written by Randy Newman. And you listen to the song, like, you can very much tell it was written by Randy Newman.

I have his album Sail Away, which is like his big. The album under his own name that people know of him. That's on that one as well. That's where I know it from.

I've said before, like, in previously mentioned multiple times, Desert island podcast, that, like, the Randy Newman songs here are a little bit more normal. But, you know, I think Harper's Bazaar does a very, very fine job at singing all this stuff.

I'd say that album Feeling Groovy as a whole is just a pinnacle of sunshine pop.

It's a wonderful album for a wonderful sunny day. And ending this nice, wonderful playlist. We're going to take it full circle with another horse song, Wild Horses by the Rolling Stones.

I can't think of a better way to end it than any. Like we started it. I like this song. It's not my favorite song on this album. I do love this is my favorite Rolling Stones album, Sticky Fingers.

Check it out. It's pretty good. Don't talk about the first song. The rest of it's really good. This song. Not my favorite though. Not my favorite.

I quite like it though.

No, no, I like wild horses. I work on a at the Equine center for Learning and Lansing and I've played wild horses for said horses.

Did they enjoy the. They enjoy it.

I think so.

Good. I'm glad they had a fun time about it.

Yeah.

But yep, fun stuff. Wonderful meeting. I not sure what the final tally of how many different kinds of animals we talked about, but we have a zoo full of them.

We should have played at the Zoo by Simon and Garfunkel.

I was surprised that you didn't play that. I was really. I was really expecting something.

I didn't do that. I didn't even think of it.

Still.

Next time. Next.

Next time. Next time we have an animal meeting, I guess.

Yeah.

Next time we have any meetings though, you should check out our website and you can find out when that's going to be. Past meetings, past themes, past playlists, anything you need to know about the club, it's all going to be there. Go check it out.

It'll be linked with the show. Thank you all for tuning in. We hope to see you next time. Bye Bye.

Goodbye.