Category: childhood

Monday’s Theme Song

Today’s song comes from yesterday’s movie.

We watched “Thor: Ragnorok” at the cinema yesterday. The movie features Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” twice. Led Zep III was one of those albums that I listened to repetitively when I was fourteen in nineteen seventy, and I came to know the album by heart. Once I heard “Immigrant Song,” I streamed the subsequent tracks into my head. Eventually, “Celebration Day” dominated more than the rest. Always like that beginning sound, and then the words, “Her face is cracked from smiling, all the fears that she’s been hiding, and it seems that pretty soon, everybody’s gonna know.”

Here, let me play it for you, and get it out of my head.

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

I don’t surf. Okay, big deal, right? I’m probably not alone in that declaration. But sometime in my youth, I adopted a private attitude that I’m riding the waves of the day. I think this song, “Skating Away on the Thin Ice of the New Day” by Jethro Tull, directly contributed to my approach.

Skate away on the day’s thin ice, ride the waves and surf through the day. Do what needs to be done to get through.

 

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

Neurons fired, streams opened, and this song came to me today. Although I’m a Blood, Sweat and Tears fan, I don’t own any of their albums. Still, I know a number of their songs, like “Spinning Wheel”, “When I Die”, and “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy”, the song that passed into my slipstream of memory was “Lucretia MacEvil”. Sit back and enjoy Clayton-Thomas’ throaty vocals and that soulful fat brass sound.

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Sunday’s Theme Music

Ah, The Band. Oddly, I was reminded of them when I was attending a Veteran’s Day Concert presented by the Southern Oregon Concert Band. Besides the Star Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful, a medley of Irving Berlin, World War I music, Aaron Copeland songs, and John Philip Sousa were presented, along with each of the U.S. military services’ march songs.

But I walked away thinking about The Band, and this song, “The Weight.” Perhaps it was because the concert program reminded me of my youth. Mired in the middle of my early growth was a little event folks call Woodstock. Part of it was “The Weight.” The song has a folksy sense that reminds me of a Faulkner album and makes me smile. I always thought of it as good road music, with questions without answers, answers without explanations, and anecdotes with gravity that give shape to our lives and change our hopes.

Hope you find something in it, too.

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

My wife and I were picking up fur last night. The cats leave it like Hansel and Gretel left crumbs to find their way back. I guess the cats, worried about losing their way from the litter box to their food bowl to their sleeping locations, leave the fur clumps to help them find their way. “I’ll just leave this fur and follow it back.”

Doing this task last night, I streamed, “I’m a fur picker. I’m a fur picker. Picking up fur. Fur, fur, fur.” The song was to the head music, “I’m A Girl Watcher,” a song from nineteen sixty-seven. I thought, that’ll be my Tuesday theme music.

Then, I began thinking about the song and the times. The song objectifies women. The attitude incubated at that point can lead to some of the rapes, molesting, and harassing now revealed across America.

Or I am overthinking it? I’m prone to such things. I can hear other argue, the song is about a boy who is growing up and developing an interest in sex, in this case, in girls. It’s completely innocent. To which I hear others say, it’s not completely innocent. It’s mostly innocent, but it’s part of larger cultural and social trends about women’s roles and men’s attitude toward women in America.

It was a lot to think about before my morning coffee. I decided not to do that song. Instead, I give you song from a year later, The Moody Blues with “Tuesday Afternoon.” I believe the song’s line, “The gentle voices I hear, explain it all with a sigh,” perfectly exemplifies my thinking conundrum about being a girl-watcher.

It’s a complicated world. My thinking probably makes it appear more complicated than it is.

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Monday’s Theme Music

Since it’s Monday, and so many songs feature Monday in their titles or lyrics, I thought I’d go with “Wooly Bully.” “Wooly Bully” does not mention Monday, as far as I know. I’ve never looked up the lyrics, but I must admit that I don’t understand most of them. As far as I know, they go, “Mattie told Hattie about a thing she saw. Something (with big horns?) and a wooly jaw. Wooly bully, wooly bully.” Mattie also tells Hattie to take a chance. The singer shouts, “I like it, I like it.”

I don’t know. I like singing that woolly bully chorus. Very liberating.

I learned the song from a forty-five RPM record on a little phonograph. I want to say it was a Capitol record, from what I remember, but I was young, and didn’t pay attention.

Here is Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs from, geez, I’m guessing mid-nineteen sixties, with “Woolly Bully.”

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Friday’s Theme Music

Care for a little cream for your Friday coffee?

Robert Johnson’s masterpiece, “Crossroads” (or “Cross Roads Blues”) has been covered by many. I like the Cream version because it was the first one I heard when I was young. It’s hard to overcome that first love. More metaphysically, it’s a song that captures so much of life’s essence, IMO. We think, after making a journey, that we’ve gone somewhere. And we have, but then, we found ourselves at another crossroad. Decisions are made, moods are felt, directions are chosen, prayers are offered, and help is sought.

So here you are, on Friday, with a “Crossroads” about what to do, where to go, and maybe, who to be.

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Thursday’s Theme Music

So much has been written about this song and its lyrics. After it became a hit in America, our local newspaper, The Pittsburgh Press (or maybe it was the Post-Gazette) had an article with the song’s words in it. My sister, two years younger than me, told me that she’d memorize the lyrics. She seemed proud of doing that. The lyricist himself, Don McLean, has avoided analyzing the lyrics. He says they’re poetry. I recall McLean once said something like, the artist should put it out there and then keep a dignified silence when others ask what the song is about.

I but into that. People often uncover their own meanings in books, stories, movies, songs, and poetry. I like that, that people can take words, sounds, and images, anchor them to their lives and events, and affix unique interpretations to them.

Here it is, “American Pie,” from nineteen seventy-one. It’s a piece of Americana.

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Wrote That Scene

Wrote one of those scenes. You know what they’re like. You’re casting for something inside yourself and discover something hidden, so you drag it out and use it.

In this instance, I used a memory from when I was young. I’d seen a creepy movie that burned anxiety into me just in time for bed. Despite that, sleep managed to find me.

Awakening, though, I kept completely still in an all-embracing darkness. Even now, remembering, my blood pressure rises and my pulse thumps faster. In that darkness, I’d heard a noise while I was asleep —

Or did I?

Was it real or imagined? I listened and listened without daring to move, barely breathing to help me hear and minimize my presence. Just when I’d begun to accept the hypothesis I’d imagined it, I heard another sound. It sounded like slithering….

Snake, I thought.

A snake is in the room.

I couldn’t move. If I left the bed, I might step on the snake. It might be coiled on the floor, waiting to strike.

But I couldn’t remain in bed, because the snake might crawl up into the bed. Which was worse, waiting in bed, or stepping down and getting bitten?

It was a rush of words to write, but it fit the novel like a found puzzle piece. As for the young boy who feared what might be in the dark, he carefully stood up in bed. Balancing himself and profusely sweating, he leaped across the yawning gulf where the snake might be waiting, and threw on the lights.

Time to go write like crazy, at least one more time.

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Saturday’s Theme Music

Fall has claimed us. Leaves have turned. Many have rained down, filling gutters and carpeting lawns and sidewalks. So I turn to “Dancing Days” by Led Zeppelin. I have firm reasoning, oh, yes, I do. Although the vegetation is going along with the timeline, we have glorious sunshine. A cold front has taken command. Nights are cold, but the sky is clear, and that sunshine pushes our temperatures up into the mid seventies. We might even touch eighty.

So dancing days are here again. It may be fall, but it feels like summer afternoons. Maybe it’s just a state of mind.

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