Today, after awakening, rising, and feeding the cats, I began streaming a Bee Gees song called “Lonely Days” (1970). Don’t know what prompted my neurotransmitters to order this song today. I think it might have to do with rain. It was raining as I awoke, and stayed in bed, listening to it for a short period before thinking, “Must have coffee,” which prompted me to get up.
“Lonely Days” always strikes me as a rainy-day song. Something about its timbre reflects a gray, rain-swept landscape to me, a feeling that intensified as I walked on damp pavement and light drizzle.
My stream is back-flashing to high school. I remember talking with my buddy, Bob, about a new Moody Blues song, “Nights In White Satin”. I already knew the song and was puzzling about how I knew this song so well already. I told Bob that I was certain it was an old song. Later, on the radio, they mentioned that the song had been originally released in 1967, but didn’t chart well in the U.S., but had been released again in 1972, the year Bob and I were talking. I felt absurdly validated and pleased that I’d accurately remembered the song had come out several years before.
“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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
