Category: childhood

Today’s Theme Music

It’s a funky Friday, perfect for those funky musicians, Sly and the Family Stone.

This was a perfect song to sing along when I was thirteen in nineteen sixty-nine. It’s even better now as a joyful anthem for an adult. Still, there were always questions about what in the world was he actually singing. I spent time when that song came on, to pause and listen, trying to decode the lyrics. They still don’t make a sense to me, but I still love them:

Stiff all in the collar
Fluffy in the face
Chit chat chatter tryin’
Stuffy in the place
Thank you for the party
But I could never stay
Many thangs is on my mind
Words in the way

Other lyrics made perfect, beautiful poetic sense to me:

Flamin’ eyes of people fear
Burnin’ into you
Many men are missin’ much
Hatin’ what they do
Youth and truth are makin’ love
Dig it for a starter, now
Dyin’ young is hard to take
Sellin’ out is harder

h/t to MetroLyrics

Let’s get funky with “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again).” It was years before I learned the correct title and the reveal that it was a mondegreen. So sue me; I was a kid.

 

 

 

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Mom’s Dislikes

Since we’re coming up on Father’s Day, I’m thinking about the things that used to anger Mom that amuses me now. It’s a short list, but each of these earned a sharp word, snapped fingers, threats, or warnings, all delivered with “the evil eye.”

Mom’s threats were usually about giving us away, sending us to an orphanage, or putting her in the nut house. We weren’t a very P.C. household in the fifties and sixties.

Here’s the list:

  • Fighting, arguing, swearing and talking back. Her idea of talking back and our idea didn’t always align. We would protest, “What was I doing?” That is talking back. Don’t do it.
  • You’d better come when called…or else.
  • Cracking your gum, blowing bubbles with your gum, or clicking you spoon against your teeth.
  • No slurping! Do not slurp your soup or your cereal. Don’t you dare suck up the final fluids of a soda or milkshake through a straw, either.
  • Don’t sneeze too many times, definitely a peculiar irritation. You can see that Mom had a thing about noises. More than three sneezes would irritate her. Sneezing too loud would also annoy her. All that exasperated us. How are we supposed to control the number of times we sneeze, or how loudly?
  • Eat all your food. That was rarely a problem for me but one sister had issues. Food items couldn’t be touching one another. That just sickened her. But Mom would order her to eat her food; she would refuse, and would sit in the darkening room, refusing to eat, until Mom relented and took her plate away. That was a battle of wills.

A short list, and nothing too terrible. As children, we’d forget, and absently do these things until Mom voiced her irritation. As adults, we find it funny, and laugh about it. We’re also aware of these matters that irk Mom. If someone starts sneezing and goes more than three times — or loudly — in Mom’s presence, one of us is certain to say, “Here we go.”

What about you? Anything that your Mom did that amuses you in memory?

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Today’s Theme Music

“Time Won’t Let Me” is a song by a group called The Outsiders.

In nineteen sixty-six, I was ten years old, part of a small group of neighborhood children on McNary Boulevard in Wilkinsburg that included Tracy and Carolann, and Mike and Richard. The group fluctuated as people moved, went on vacation, or attended Bible School. Technically, I’d moved away to Penn Hills, but I came back to visit friends.

I don’t know who, exactly, bought this record, or the rest. We listened to them on a little portable turntable. The record was part of a stack of forty-five R.P.M. singles. Setting up in someone’s basement during the summer months, we listened and danced to these records while pretending to sing the songs and play the instruments. The Monkees began dominating the stack, although Johnny Rivers had a strong presence. Others included Herman and the Hermits, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and Nancy Sinatra. As the summer passed, our interests and musical tastes shifted. But for a while, we had our forty-fives.

Now, watching this video, I laugh.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s music is provided by Eric Burdon and The Animals, so it’s an old song, yeah?

I remember that Mom was really excited about Eric Burdon and The Animals coming on to television. I’m not sure what show they were appearing on, as I was about eight years old. I think it may have been “The Ed Sullivan Show.” I lived in Wilkinsburg, PA, on Laketon Road, across from Turner Elementary School. That’s how vivid this memory is of that week. Mom was talking about it while ironing and dressing to go to work at her job as a telephone operator.

Eric Burdon and The Animals’ appearance hugely disappointed Mom. Somehow, in the course of the advertising, she thought it was to be singing animals! My older sister laughed and laughed over that.

This song is an old stand-by for me. “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” was often selected as a theme song when I was down, depressed, frustrated, or bitter, which seems to be quite a bit. I would sing it to my self, my wife, my cats, my work teams, whatever. There’s something freeing and invigorating about singing, “We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.”

Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Whether it’s physical, emotional, or intellectual, if there’s a place you gotta get out of, this song is ideal for fortifying your determination to do so.

Here they are, from nineteen sixty-five, Eric Burdon and The Animals, with all the glory of nineteen sixty-five technology.

 

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Today’s Theme Song

Accumulating steps and miles for my Fitbit in Ashland’s downtown yesterday, I heard a busker belting out an acoustic version of “Simple Man.” Remembering it from my high school years, I started singing along to myself. Lynyrd Skynyrd was part of the rising southern rock movement in the seventies, along with ZZ Top, the Charlie Daniels Band, and the Marshall Tucker Band.

The song, with its clear vocals and power guitars, reminded me of those years and a simpler period of life when my main concerns were getting gas money and passing tests in school. When the song stopped abruptly yesterday, I hunted the busker down in an unused business entrance on Main Street where he was changing a guitar string. We chatted a bit and I donated a few bucks to his cause.

The song, of course, hijacked my mental stream and stayed, so I pass it on to you. Here’s Lynyrd Skynyrd with “Simple Man,” from their first album in nineteen seventy-three.

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Today’s Theme Music

Yes, I know what the calendar says. According to it, it isn’t summer. But we have one of those hot, humid weeks in our little city brewing where you feel the sweat, heat and grit on the back of your neck.

Here’s the Lovin’ Spoonful in nineteen sixty-six with “Summer in the City.”

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Today’s Theme Music

Here’s a Friday two-fer.

I’d planned for a celebratory song today but this one dominated one of my dreams last night. “When the Levee Breaks” is an old blues song. I became familiar with it through Led Zeppelin’s cover of it in nineteen seventy-one.

In my dream, it was my wake-up song, playing every day on my radio at seven in the morning. I know this because I was explaining that to other people. I told them, I’d begun doing that in June, so I’d been doing it for a year. During that time, I’d found a new shortcut, I explained. While explaining that, I pointed out a window at a new white concrete highway that was alongside a shoreline. The sky was so blue and the sun was so bright, it awed you into silence. Vehicles were on the road. It looked like typical commuter traffic.

We joked a while about hearing that song everyday. I know it was “When the Levee Breaks” because one other asked, “What is that song?” Then he answered himself as I answered him, “”When the Levee Breaks,” by Led Zeppelin.” He nodded, laughing along as we spoke. He said, “It’s a good song. I don’t know if I’d want to hear it all the time.” I answered, “I only hear it in the morning.” He replied, “Well, even that might be too much, if it’s every day.”

I awoke from that and the other two remembered dreams feeling like a dark cloud had been lifted. You decide, though: will hearing this song every morning be too much?

 

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Today’s Theme Music

The stream has shifted. Into the flow comes an all-time favorite by a little band called Derek and the Dominoes, with help from a guy named Duane Allman. Eric Clapton and Jim Gordon wrote the song, “Layla,” as a love ballad about Eric’s love for George Harrison’s wife, Patty Boyd. Duane entered the picture and changed the song to its more familiar rock sound.

Back in those days, I didn’t know about the confusion arising over the name of the group. I knew when I heard the song, I loved it and sought it out. I thought it was Eric Clapton playing, but if it was this guy, Derek, I didn’t care. Being a slow witted animal, I eventually grasped that it was Eric playing and singing, with help from the great Duane Allman – which explains the similarity to the Allman Brothers’ music of that period, right? It all eventually came together.

To me, this is a triumphant, feel-good song that ignites my creative energies. Pick up your air guitar. Time to jam.

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Today’s Theme Music

Mom gave this album to me for a Christmas present in nineteen seventy-three, a gift made on my older sister’s recommendation.

I was ecstatic. I’d only heard and read a little about the album, ‘Quadraphenia,’ but I was an enormous Who fan at that point. Come on, they were fresh off ‘Tommy’ and ‘Who’s Next?,’ with the legendary, ‘Won’t Be Fooled Again.’ Their music spoke to a wannabe teenage rebel on the cusp of childhood’s end.

I played the bejesus out of this album, generally at a wall-shaking volume. This song, ‘The Real Me,’ was the opening track. While the song speaks to me with its lyrics and Daltry’s delivery, I’m enamored with Entwhistle’s flowing, active, dominating bass.

The cracks between the paving stones
Look like rivers of flowing veins
Strange people who know me
Peeping from behind every window pane
The girl I used to love
Lives in this yellow house
Yesterday she passed me by
She doesn’t want to know me now

h/t to Metrolyrics.com

I think it’s an appropriate song for the Internet age and the era of fake news. People hide behind anonymous posts and comments, putting forward false identities, deploying lies and false information to stoke fear and doubt, and further their causes.

Can you see the real me?

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Today’s Theme Music

Going to see the Four Tops and Temptations at the Britt this year. Buying the tickets triggered a need to hear some Motown today. What better song for this era of burgeoning WH scandals and a plethora fake news than ‘Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World Is Today)’, from nineteen seventy? Shows just how long we’ve been a ball of confusion.

 

 

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