A cat’s activities brought me awake. As I tended him and then used the restroom, this song was streaming through my thoughts:
“Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, we’d hear it from the people of the town, they’d call us, gypsies, tramps, and thieves, but every night, the men would come around, and lay their money down.”
I don’t know why I was streaming Cher’s 1971 hit, “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves”. I was dreaming, and I remember the dreams. There wasn’t a sound track, just conversations.
Was it something that the cat did? Don’t know. It sure doesn’t seem like dream music.
This song’s release and popularity in 1975 began changing my thinking. While I’d always tried to see others’ point of view, I often failed, and slipped easily into the comfort of being me, sure of what was going on, and surer about how others live. I had some inklings that all was not as I thought from newscasts about riots, war, politics, and social upheaval, and I knew from friends, movies, and reading that lives often appear to be fine on the outside but it was rank darkness behind the scenes.
Then came this Janis Ian song, “At Seventeen”. As a boy, I thought the girls had all of the breaks. They controlled it all. We boys were the ones struggling with social graces and talking to girls. I didn’t know what it meant to a girl to meet a boy who seemed to like who and said he would call her, and then didn’t. I didn’t know what it meant for her to watch others being chosen, or how difficult it was, coping with body changes, and struggling with social perceptions and self-perception.
Life is usually more nuanced, layered, and complicated than many realize. We think everyone is the same, that all words mean the same, that every action carries the same weight. That these things aren’t true are lessons I keep learning and forgetting.
Aretha Franklin’s death and the service held to honor her reminded me that I grew up in a privileged time and place. Pop, rock, soul, R&B, punk, psychedelic, rockabilly…these were just a few of the emerging sub-genres of music developing. Reaching audiences like me were aided by advances in the recording, duplicating, and broadcasting media. As people, we were forced in earlier eras to travel to bars, clubs, and other venues to enjoy performers’ offerings. Radio and television changed that, and the Internet has expanded that ability.
I was lucky. I had radios and television, food, a roof, decent schools, and relatively stable home life. I was lucky, too, because great producers, musicians, and entrepreneurs were bringing us the sounds. And I was lucky because there were people and groups like the Stones, the Who, the Supremes, CCR, Led, Santana, Aretha, Elvis, Stevie Wonder, the Jacksons and Osmonds, Eric Clapton, John Mayall…what a list could be made. But that’s what wikipedia is about.
I have my favorites. Guitar heroes and keyboard masters remain my weakness, but great voices and song-writers always turn my head, too. Or, give me a beat…yeah, you know.
Thinking of all that, and the riotous eternal summer that was my youth, I remembered Diana Ross & The Supremes. The catalog of their songs is stupendous, and their hits are cherished as classics of an era and the Motown Sound. Was it the end of the innocence, the beginning of the awakening, or the age of Aquarius?
Here is “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”, written by Ashford and Simpson, and recorded by many, but the cover streaming to me today is the one by “Diana Ross and the Supremes”. It’s powerful stuff to stream.
I associate many things with my childhood, especially matters of pop culture. TV was just breaking big in the 1960s in America, as was pop and rock music, and all their variations, on AM radio. As an child who was four when the sixties began, I was swept along. I didn’t choose much of the music I heard. It was everywhere from transistor radios that people carried to car radios to television. Some of the music isn’t to my adult tastes, but they’re part of my cultural DNA.
Today’s song, “Never My Love” by the Association from 1967, is one of those songs.
“And the love that I feel is so far away. I’m a bad dream that I just had today. And you shake your head and say, it’s a shame.”
Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick album was released in 1972. Sixteen years old, I bought it on vinyl and wore it out playing it. Listening to this concept album last night – concept albums were big in those years – it reminds me of some of the era’s Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer music — or they remind me of Jethro Tull. Like most art, it’s a continuum of exploration and imagining, building on what’s heard and done.
“But your wise men don’t know how it feels, to be thick as a brick.”
I took her home to my place, watching every move on her face
She said, “Look, what’s your game, baby?
Are you tryin’ to put me in shame? ”
I said, “Slow, don’t go so fast
Don’t you think that love can last? ”
She said, “Love, lord above, now you’re gonna trick me in love”
All right now baby, it’s all right now
All right now baby, it’s all right now
I’m always surprised when people do and don’t know the words to popular music, but then again, we’re not all in the same vacuum. A friend of mine insists he only really knows and likes one song. That song is “Battle of New Orleans” by Johnny Horton. That I knew it and could sing it to him impressed him.
His wife is like me. I guess we listened to a lot of music on the radio. Her husband’s excuse is that he was doing tours in Vietnam during that time. (Cue, “Country Joe and the Fish” and the “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die” rag. No, he doesn’t know that one, either.) He’s older than us.
I’m surprised, too, by the young people who know the classic rock songs. Many know them via their parents and older siblings’ listening habits, while others learn the music through movies or video games like “Guitar Hero”.
Here’s Free from 1970 with one you may or may not know, “All Right Now”.
I was streaming this song as I walked today. It’s a favorite song. A number of performers have covered it. I think my two preferred versions are by Creedence Clearwater Revival and Marvin Gaye. CCR did a long version of it that has a little more rock ingrained, while Gaye’s version had more blues and soul to it. Gaye’s version was released in 1968 and was a huge hit. CCR came out with their version in 1970.
“Two drifters off to see the world, there’s a lot of world to see.”
Today’s theme music is “Moon River” from Breakfast At Tiffany’s. Why not? Based on Truman Capote’s novella, the movie was released in 1961. The song came out the same year. I was five, so I don’t remember much of that, but Mom loved music and movies, and she exposed me to these things. After In Cold Blood came out, I read it and then read other Capote works, including Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
The song and movie are an emblem of the times. Johnny Mercer wrote the song’s lyrics, and Henry Mancini composed the music. Those are some big names in that business. George Pepard and Audrey Hepburn starred in the movie, which was directed by Blake Edwards. Pepard’s character was gay, gay in 1961, and the world didn’t come apart. Hell, Capote was gay. Yet, now, a zillion years later, some in the world want to turn back time, back to the way things were. Did they forget that gays existed back then?
(*snark alert* Yes, I know, they haven’t forgotten, but gays and the coloreds knew their place, then, didn’t they, in this white mythical world where everyone was happy as long as everyone was kept in their place.)
What the movie was and what it was supposed to be, like the novella, like our times, and our memories of those times, depends upon your baggage. I thought that song was perfect in many ways, romantic, hopeful, and smooth, tidying up an image and glossing over deeper struggles. The song and movie came out right before the explosions of the 1960s. When we think of it, we don’t think of the grace of Breakfast At Tiffany’s and “Moon River.” We’re more likely to remember riots, demonstrations, the civil rights movement, protests, and the expanding Vietnam War. Really, 1961 was still part of the fifties.
Many sang or recorded “Moon River” but Mom liked Andy Williams, so that’s the version that I know best.
Monday o’memories – I stumbled across some ol’ Grand Funk Railroad stuff while browsing today, and remembered their first live album. It was my sister’s album, but I really enjoyed it, another step in my rock music education. It was a 33 RPM vinyl record that I played on Mom’s big Magnavox stereo that resided in the living room of our thirteen-hundred square foot ranch-style home in Penn Hills, PA. I only did this when I was home alone.
GFR was basic and almost primal in their early years before moving on to more of a pop sound. This first song, “Are You Ready”, epitomized their first year, I think – frenetic musical energy.
Michael Seidel, writer 