Wednesday’s Theme Music

1973 wasn’t the best of years for me.

I became seventeen that year. I’d moved in with my father the year before, 1972. He retired from the Air Force, and we moved to West Virginia. We bought a place, and it burned down. Just about all the few possessions I had when I quit living with Mom were gone. We didn’t have insurance. The paperwork and payment were on the dining room table, and burned.

I was hoping for better with 1973. It went great for a while, but then I cut off the end of my big toe while cutting the grass with a gas-powered lawn mower. That took me out of sports and doing many things. Frequently a loner, I retreated into art, music, and reading, which were always my natural sanctuaries.

Fortunately, ’73 was a good year for music. This song, “Drift Away” performed and released by Dobie Gray, summed up the year for me.

Beginnin’ to think that I’m wastin’ time
I don’t understand the things I do
The world outside looks so unkind
Now I’m countin’ on you to carry me through

Oh, give me the beat boys and free my soul
I wanna get lost in your rock ‘n’ roll and drift away
Yeah, give me the beat boys and free my soul
I wanna get lost in your rock ‘n’ roll and drift away

And when my mind is free
You know a melody can move me
And when I’m feelin’ blue
The guitar’s comin’ through to soothe me

h/t to elyrics.net

January 24, 2018 2

Tuesday’s Theme Music

Don’t know about you, but Gospel music often talks to me. Aided by a dream, this song streamed into my consciousness from the year 1972. “I’ll Take You There” was a great song for the time because its slow beat allowed a close, swaying slow-dance with a girl, something that I sought when I was a sixteen year old boy. It’s like a feel-good song of hope, not for love alone, but for progress and civil rights.

Here are the Staple Singers with their 1972 hit.

January 23, 2018 0

Monday’s Theme Music

This John Lennon song, “Whatever Get You Through the Night,” is energetic and peppy, and struck me as much different from his other offerings. I like the extensive, enthusiastic sax in it, which, with the piano, makes the song feel like it’s from a different era, and the twist on the lyrics that becomes “Whatever gets your through your life.” That’s how a lot of us live, somewhere between dreaming and striving, grabbing and holding on to what comes our way.

January 22, 2018 0

Sunday’s Theme Music

This is a long time favorite. I hope I’ve not shared it before. If I have, suffer.

Let’s listen to CCR, sometimes more formally known as Creedence Clearwater Revival, and their song, “Bad Moon Rising,” from 1969. I like this, too, for the mondegreen, where, “There’s a bad moon on the rise,” is sometimes heard as “There’s a bath room on the right.” I’ve been known to propagate the misheard lyric and assure people those are the corrects words.

Cheers

January 21, 2018 0

Monday’s Theme Song

I can play the what-if? game with any subject. Not hard. A reflective exercise, it can be fun, and it’s helpful when writing fiction. Mostly, the game is about wondering how things would have changed if this or that hadn’t happened.

Janis Joplin died in 1970 of a heroin overdose. She was twenty-seven. She would have turned seventy-five this week. She achieved much in a short life. Playing what-if?, you can imagine how much more she might have done.

On the positive side, she was a person who’s celebrated and remembered. Too many people die and have no one playing the what-if? game with their life. Too many die too young for vain causes or absurd reasons. Of course, it’s death, and we all die. The reasons for our death is a lot of feed for what-if?

January 15, 2018 1

Saturday’s Theme Music

Another Who offering has hooked into my streaming memories.

This one, “Join Together,” was released in 1972, while I was in high school. I remember hearing it and thinking, that’s the Who, because they always had a distinctive sound, especially with Daltry’s voice. Like a lot of Who songs, interesting sounds, instruments, and arrangements lend Who songs thickly textured melodies. I like that. I prefer complications in books, movies, and music. At the same time, I’ve always been invested in guitar sounds. That’s why the guitar draws me to a lot of southern urban rock, and blues, or blues-rock, and classic rock. But even with Townsend’s synthesizers, the Who prevail and maintain a hold as one of my favorite rock groups.

Here’s “Join Together.”

January 13, 2018 0

Friday’s Theme Music

Confession: I didn’t know who sang this song. Nor do I remember the first time I heard it. After looking up the artist, I still didn’t know who he was, but I knew the song from AM radio.

“Down in the Boondocks” apparently came out in 1965. I was nine. The performer with the hit was Billy Joe Royal. After googling him, I found I knew several of his songs, like “Cherry Hill Park.”

“Down in the Boondocks” started streaming in my head while I was talking to Tucker (one of my cats) and emptying the dishwasher. Yeah, I don’t see the connection either.

January 12, 2018 0

Wednesday’s Theme Music

This song is one of my defacto songs that I start streaming when I’m walking. Several walking songs are plugged into my streaming library. There’s a Nancy Sinatra offering, where she sings “These boots are made for walking,” and a song less about walking but about getting there from Grand Funk, “I’m getting closer to my home,” and some song by some guy named Miller who sings, “King of the Road.” Which one pops into my stream seems dependent on my mood.

Today’s classic is offered by Edwin Starr. Here is “Twenty-five Miles,” from 1969.

January 10, 2018 0

Monday’s Theme Music

Another loopback to my early teen years. Donovan’s music, with its psychedelic, flower-power, folk-rock influences and sounds. I stream several of his songs in my head, sometimes slipping into whole albums. Today, though, I’m stuck on “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” You can imagine how the repetitive words and guitars can mesmerize someone like me, who seems attracted to such noises. Such sounds were especially enticing to me when I was twelve, when I theoretically first heard this song on AM radio. I have no clear memory of the first time I heard it, only that I enjoy all those “hurdy gurdy” and “roly poly” lyrics.

So I’m posting “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” today, but not with an eye toward stopping its looping. It fits in well with my mood, and I’m pleased to have its company.

Well, for now.

January 8, 2018 0

Sunday’s Theme Music

They – the omnipotent, omniscient, slightly mysterious and ill-defined ‘they’ – say that the best way to rid yourself of an earworm is to pass it on. That’s what I plan to do today.

On the other hand, I said to myself, perhaps I’m part of a chain. I’m streaming an old song – hell, I was six years old when it became a hit – but the fates put the song there knowing that I’d post about it to rid myself of it. There’s no earthly reason for streaming this song. It just popped into my head. It’s not my sort of music, and I don’t own, and never have, owned an album by these performers.

But maybe someone out there needs to hear this song. I don’t know. How this whole thing called life works is almost as complex as “A Game of Thrones”, or the definition of a catch in the N.F.L.

Here we go, with the Lettermen, from 1962, with “Turn Around, Look At Me.” Others have done it and had hits with it, but this version is the one looping in my stream.