Category: childhood

Tuesday’s Theme Music

“For the Love of Money” by the O’Jays was released in 1974, the year I escaped high school by way of a bar of soap carved to look like a diploma. Like a zillion other people, I immediately took to the song’s funky sounds, hip lyrics, and the message that money corrupts. I started singing it then, and I still sing it now.

For the love of money, people will steal from their mother
For the love of money, people will rob their own brother
For the love of money, people can’t even walk the street
Because they never know who in the world they’re gonna meet
For that mean, oh mean, mean green
Almighty dollar, cash money

h/t to genius.com

It seems like this song is more relevant today than it was over a quarter of a century ago. If you don’t have money, you have to get it, and if you have it, you hold onto it. If you have a lot of it, it becomes a disease to hold onto what you have and get more. Money inspires corruption, power, selfishness, and greed. It’s a simplistic take in a complicated world.

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Saturday’s Theme Music

Someone shared this vocals & guitars only video of Queen on FB. I enjoyed it and thought, let’s share it as today’s theme music.

Hope you enjoy this recording of Freddie Mercury and Queen performing “Killer Queen” as much as I do.

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Thursday’s Theme Music.

I guess this is a throwback Thursday. Of course, many of my days are throwbacks. Some are throwaways.

I found myself streaming some ZZ Top as I walked this morning.

Jesus just left Chicago and he’s bound for New Orleans.
Well now, Jesus just left Chicago and he’s bound for New Orleans.
Yeah, yeah.
Workin’ from one end to the other and all points in between.

Took a jump through Mississippi, well, muddy water turned to wine.
Took a jump through Mississippi, muddy water turned to wine.
Yeah, yeah.
Then out to California through the forests and the pines.
Ah, take me with you, Jesus.

h/t to Lyricsfreak.com

Why this song, today? I don’t know. Maybe a smell that I didn’t consciously notice triggered a memory, or two neurons ran into each other on an axon and reminisced about the old days. Perhaps I whiffed someone toking up and connected that to  ZZ Top. Perhaps, in worrying about the present and future, I subconsciously longed for the past, and dredged up times that were simpler and happier for me. Maybe there’s no logic at all, but just random impulses.

The world may never know.

 

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

I’ve always enjoyed War. Their music speaks to me. Today’s song, “Why Can’t We Be Friends”, is an excellent accompaniment to walking about town. As part of the writing practice, I walk and think about where I’m at with my writing and editing projects. Once freed of that, I drift into other things. This song, though, was heard coming from a Toyota pickup truck as it trundled by. Picking up on it, I sang it and some other War songs, like “Smile Happy”, “Low Rider”, “The World Is A Ghetto”, and “Spill the Wine”. Such classics.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s song, “Nowhere Man,” by the Beatles, came out in 1965. I vividly remember carrying a small transistor radio (with a nine volt battery) and listening to this song early one summer afternoon, singing along with it as I walked along Laketon Road in Wilkinsburg, Pa. The lyrics were simple but seemed powerful to me.

It must have been in 1966, and I was ten when I was doing that. Fifty-two years later, I’m walking along A Street in Ashland, Or., singing it to myself in an early late summer morning. It still seems like simple but powerful song.

 

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Thursday’s Theme Music

4:30 A.M.

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.

 

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Wednesday’s Theme 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.

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Saturday’s Theme Music

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.

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Friday’s Theme Music

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.

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

“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.”

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