The Ginger Blade wanted out last night. He’s a cat; he’s young; they go out at night.
As I let him out the door, he paused and looked at me over his shoulder. “I’ll be back,” he said. Then, he trotted into the darkness.
From that streamed the music for today. Thinking of Papi’s words, my mind connected with a nineteen sixty-eight Simon and Garfunkel hit. “Mrs Robinson” was on the album “Bookends,” but is probably best known for its inclusion in the movie, “The Graduate.” When Papi told me, “I’ll be back,” I started singing, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns its lonely eyes on you.”
I wonder at what age people ask, “What movie? What song? Who is Simon and Garfunkel? Who is Joe DiMaggio? Who is Papi? Is he the Ginger Blade?”
I thought, “Tuesday,” and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ballad, “Tuesday’s Gone,” streamed in from their first album, released in nineteen seventy-three.
It’s a relaxing, reflective song. I was in my last year of high school when I first heard it. It feels like a song that’s right for going into your final year. After a final year of anything, everything is changed, which is the sentiment I infer from “Tuesday’s Gone.”
The Wayback Machine began streaming another relic of a song to me. This one blasted me from the early 70s. I’ve found that when my writing sessions are going strong, my song list shifts into that period. It wasn’t my happiest time, so I don’t know why I stream that era’s music.
Here’s those synthetic progressive rock masters, Emerson, Lake and Palmer – ELP – with, “Welcome Back, My Friends, to the Show That Never Ends.”
Nineteen sixty-nine, thirteen years old. The Rolling Stones were one of the hottest, biggest rock groups around. And this song, “Gimme Shelter,” stopped me with its opening. Haunting, arresting, it gave me pause to hear what was going to come next, revealing intense, moody, and angry lyrics.
You know, when you keep your hopes alive, you keep believing, a change is going to come. Just today and tomorrow, and it’s the weekend, if that means anything to you. Fall is here in the Pacific Northwest, and winter is coming. Twenty-seventeen has built up its speed, and there’s every evidence it’s going to keep accelerating until it crashes into twenty-eighteen. Time flies; our lives fly. And we keep hoping for change.
I didn’t hear this song until long after its release. Someone covered it; I don’t know who. I didn’t know the song, and long after I first heard it, when the net finally come to be, I remembered it, bit by bit, and looked for it. Here it is, Sam Cooke, with “A Change Is Gonna Come, from nineteen-sixty-four. You gotta believe it, if you’re going to persevere.
Once again, I’m streaming music in via the Wayback Machine. This time, the rotary dial has spun around and landed on an Allman Brothers Band offering.
I spent hours listening to the ABA when I was in my teens, first on thirty-three R.P.M. vinyl, and then on cassette and open reels. I’d get prone on the shag-rug carpeting, lights off and the volume up, and let the music pummel me. I’d moved through those mediums seeking faithful fidelity, free of wow and flutter, and buzz and hum. Yes, I was insane.
“Ramblin Man,” written by band-member Dickey Betts, came out in seventy-three, when I was entering my senior year at high school. The song is off the album, “Brothers and Sisters.” A popular song, it’s probably one of ABA’s best known releases.
I offer it for your Tuesday pleasure, but it’s acceptable to enjoy it on other days.
Today’s theme song comes from last night’s activities. We attended the Rock the Resistance last night, an Indivisible fund raiser for Oregon District Two. Local talent performed. We have terrific local talent, like the Rogue Suspects, LEFT, and Girls Just Want to Have Fun. One of the songs performed was “Higher Ground.”
Written and recorded by Stevie Wonder in nineteen seventy-three, when I was still getting my eyes opened in high school, it’s an uplifting song, perfect for a fund-raiser supporting the “Resist!” movement. While dancing, singing along, and sipping a beer, I thought of the rest of the world. War in Myanmar. Flooding in Asia. Evacuations for Hurricane Irma. Eyes on Hurricane Jose. Texas and Louisiana recovering from Hurricane Harvey. Mexico recovering from an earthquake. Wars on going on everywhere, driving people from their lands into a search for safety, and wild fires burning in Canada, America’s Pacific Northwest, and California. It’s a mess, ain’t it?
It ain’t new. All these things have always been going on. War, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes have always been with us.
One hundred years ago, in nineteen seventeen, learning about other’s catastrophe and trying to help them out would have taken some time. Now, updates come by the second via digital channels, satellites, and social media, and connect us to one another.
Watching disasters and wars on my monitors and televisions while sipping coffee at home demonstrates how fast technology has outraced our thinking, culture, and politics. We’re together but isolated. We don’t need to be. Dare I say that we need a significant paradigm shift?
Yes. Technology is going to keep racing by. And look how much of it is conceived and designed in one locale, manufactured in another location, and sold and used in other places. We need each other. Meanwhile, countries are starting to man the borders to shut others out. It’s backward behavior. Fear drives many of these actions. Hatred contributes, and ignorance amplifies and sustains this backward behavior.
We’re one world. We’re one tribe. We keep spiting others, and end up spiting ourselves. Come on, people, we need to get our shit together. Time to start trying, and keep on trying, until we reach a higher ground. That’s the paradigm shift needed: we need to stop thinking in terms of nations, and think in terms of people, without regard for anything except that we’re all people.
Jimi Hendrix took me like he’d done so many others. I heard his music and thought, “Whoa. Who is that?”
Hendrix died when I was in my freshman year at high school. School had just begun a few weeks before. Attending John H. Linton Intermediate school, I was smitten with Melissa Smith. Melissa sat behind me in science. I was shy, so Melissa took it upon her to talk to me. Her opening gambit was about music. First we talked about “Tommy” and other Who songs. Then Hendrix died, so we talked about his music and death. Funny, but in my memory, Melissa was my opposite. She dressed in a preppie style, skirts, blouses and sweaters, while my attire skated along the spectrum toward unkempt hippie. My hair was a wild and curly mess while she sported something from “That Girl.” Nevertheless, we liked each other.
Years after Hendrix’s passing, I learned about his influence on the British musicians, like Clapton, Lennon, Jagger, Jones, and Townsend. Their interest and impressions of him provided me with a vicarious bond to the times. Almost fifty hears later, “Fire” energizes me in a way few other songs ever do.
Here we go. Reference to what is a classic in your personal realm of taste is different from others. Age, era, and where and when you grew up all count into it, right? Other factor play into it. The net, what’s classic in my personal universe is foreign to you, and the reverse applies.
But this is a classic for me. It often streams into my head in conjunction with my muse. Muse might be properly plural here. I have multiple voices in my head. They all might belong to one muse, who likes doing other voices, or an army of muses. I don’t know. I sometimes wonder, when you die, what happens to the voices in your head, like your muses? I believe they go find someone else to reside in.
Here is my classic, a song for my muse. Several have covered it, but the classic for me is Santana, in nineteen seventy. I remember listening it on my little AM/FM clock radio, “with stereo.” Then I had it on vinyl, open reel, cassette tape, and CD.
Today, Monday, August twenty-first, is the great eclipse day. People in Oregon, where I reside, are almost all beside themselves with anticipation. Today’s theme music is naturally related to the eclipse.
Numerous songs about the eclipse exist. I was drawn to “Eclipse,” by Pink Floyd, from their “Dark Side of the Moon” album. It’s a life-long favorite album, well, since I was seventeen, when it came out. The final words speak to me:
All that you touch
All that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
All that you love
All that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
All that you give
All that you deal
All that you buy
Beg, borrow or steal
All you create
All you destroy
All that you do
All that you say
All that you eat
And everyone you meet
All that you slight
And everyone you fight
All that is now
All that is gone
All that’s to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon
It’s a beautiful way of expressing that everything is connected while capturing the irony, everything is in tune, but the moon is eclipsing the sun, so…what has happened?
But then, awakening and looking out into the backyard, where sunshine first appears, I thought, here comes the sun, and wondered how many people at different times of this day have stood, watching the sky, and will say or think, “Here comes the sun.” With those thoughts, it became my choice for today’s music.
“Here Comes the Sun,” the Beatles, nineteen sixty-nine. It’s really appropriate for post-eclipse singing.
Michael Seidel, writer 