I’ve been thinking about the Beatles’ song, “Hello, Goodbye”. A simple song, I’ve thought often of this song in the context of people taking different views of something. To me, the words were about trying to reconcile differences between people – “You say, goodbye, and I say, hello.” The lyrics were saying, “We can’t agree on anything.” Yet, the song is optimistic; they’re talking about this.
Beyond that, like most Beatles songs, I like their use of their instruments and timing to add inflections and nuances. Yet, watching the video, and the almost bored attitude as they play, and listening to the words, it’s really a tedious little song. What about those costumes, too?
But, it’s in my head, and I have to get it out, so I’m putting it out to you. Sue me if you’re upset.
I walked eight miles yesterday. Not all in one go, but through three different ventures. While doing that, multiple songs were streamed. One of them is called ‘Mongoose’, by Elephant’s Memory. A hit in nineteen seventy, I don’t believe anyone I’ve ever met recalled the song when I mentioned it. I had to confirm with Internet sources what year that it was a hit and could only recall about a third of the lyrics. I’m not certain why I started streaming it into my head yesterday. Just one of those curiosities.
What about you? Do you remember this song, or have you ever heard it?
The Wayback Machine started streaming music from nineteen sixty-seven this morning. I don’t know what triggered that setting. Maybe it was that I read a VOX article ranking the best Rolling Stones songs yesterday, and several of the top ten seemed to be from the mid to late sixties.
At any rate, from the Stones came a Van Morrison connection. I enjoy his voice and style and found myself singing several of his songs, including ‘Brown Eyed Girl’. I’ve always enjoyed the simple melody and nostalgic, evocative lyrics. Much later in life, I discovered that the song’s lyrics were too suggestive for the radio. I learned it at the same time that I became educated on ‘Wake Up Little Susie’s’ shocking lyrics. I’ve also read, but haven’t been able to vet this, that Van Morrison didn’t think much of his hit.
His thoughts on his song doesn’t change my impressions of it. I hope you enjoy it, and that the lyrics don’t offend you too much.
Another anniversary was passed. This one was less remembered and noted than many anniversaries.
Today’s song is ‘Ohio’, by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSN&Y). The Kent State shootings inspired the song when Ohio National Guardsman shot at protesters, killing four, in nineteen seventy. Nine others were wounded. Some of those shot were watching the protest or walking the area, and not taking part in the protests.
I vividly remember hearing the song for the first time. It was a warm morning, but humid after thunderstorms the previous night, and our patch of suburbia was richly green. I was in my friend’s back yard in Penn Hills, PA. Curt lived up the street from me. He, John, Ricky and Bruce, all neighbors and classmates (except Bruce), were the core of my friendships. Curt’s back yard was slick with mud from the heavy rains. Mosquitoes were swarming, along with horse flies.
The Kent State protests were mostly about President Nixon’s Cambodia Campaign, just announced. It seems appropriate for our era, as we’re protesting an American Executive branch’s words, actions, behavior and stated intentions, to listen to this song and think about the words. Appallingly, I saw an FB post encouraging ‘vets’ to run over protesters. It sickened my heart to read such sentiments. Is that why vets went to war, to return and run over others exercising their rights and freedoms?
Some seem to have twisted ideas about how it all works.
Speaking as a vet and knowing many vets, I don’t believe most of them think protesters should be run over. Maybe I’m in a bubble, and I’m wrong. We used to say, I don’t agree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it. So, on the one hand, yes, the person can encourage vets to run over protesters, as it’s their right, but I find their sentiment sublimely hateful, ignorant, and depressing.
This song captured how appalled some of us were then. I remember being surprised that my friends were unaware of the Kent State shootings or what it was all about. Their parents were aware but guarded. Looking back, I grasp how conservative that housing plan where I lived was at the time.
Listen to the song, though, and the chorus, “Four dead in Ohio,” stays with you.
Keeping it simple and staying with classic rock from the nineteen seventies. Here is Bad Company with ‘Can’t Get Enough’. While I listened to it in the barracks during technical training, hurrying around the Triangle at Keesler AFB, or driving around my first assignment at Wright-Pat, it remains a great song for streaming through your head and walking around.
Nineteen seventy-four: I had my license and a car. The car was a nineteen sixty-five Mercury Comet sedan. Forest green and an automatic, its two eighty-nine V-8 hustled me around the hills of southern West Virginia.
I graduated high school. My wife, who was then my girlfriend, was a year behind me, and had gone to Europe for a month. I was working odd jobs at the oil and gas distribution center when the Air Force recruiter called me. What the hell, I decided, and enlisted.
It was a shock to my girlfriend. It was a shock to everyone.
It wasn’t the greatest decision, an impulse because I was impatient to get out of there, to be free, to be my own person, impatience that still haunts me.
There’s no doubt what song represents that year best: ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’, by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. I used to sing it to my girlfriend, to entertain her.
‘Smoke On the Water’ was a big hit for Deep Purple in 1973.
I was finishing my high school junior year when this air guitar-inspiring, head bopping power rock of the finest vintage. That it was based on a true story and had interesting references in the lyrics was an added bonus. Crank this song up and the walls would throb while the windows rattled. Peers, though, would share my grin. Guys loved it; girls tolerated it. We couldn’t hear anything else, but what the hell did it matter?
It was a good song for lighting up a doobie, which sometimes happened back then.
I moved in with Dad in nineteen seventy-one. I was fifteen. He was in the U.S. Air Force, and had returned from Vietnam by way of Germany (where he had a gorgeous blue Mustang convertible). Now assigned to DESC, Wright-Pat AFB provided administrative support. We lived on Page Manor military base housing.
That lasted about three months. Presented with an opportunity and having his years in, Dad retired from the Air Force. We moved to southern West Virginia. After moving into a place, it burned down. If we didn’t lose our possessions to fire, we lost them to smoke and water damage. He and I spent a month living in a friend’s home but it was small and cramped. Unable to find anything else, Dad bought a seventy-foot long, fourteen foot wide mobile home and rented a space in Doy Mobile Home Park.
In retrospect, Dad lived through an interesting period then. He re-married when I was sixteen, almost seventeen. New offspring soon followed. Graduating high-school, and with a second child on the way to join Dad’s household, I joined the military and left.
Dad had two young sons by the year’s end. One of them was killed in a car accident. The loss destroyed his marriage. He ended up having an affair with a co-worker. Her marriage was disintegrating. Her husband was already suffering emotional issues, and committed suicide. Dad moved in with the widow. That all took place in a six year run.
From that era comes a song that makes me laugh. Ranked as one of the greatest pop songs of all time, it came out in nineteen seventy-two. Carly Simon’s song, You’re So Vain’, stays in conversations about who the song is about. She’s given clues. Others claim she’s confided in them. Men like Warren Beatty insisted the song was about him.
I’m still streaming from my childhood years in the Pittsburgh area today. This one came out while I live in Penn Hills. Those days were filled with school and snow activities in the winter, and sports and friends just about every day. When the sun heated the days into the eighties and nineties in the summer, Penn Hills was a gorgeous backdrop to growing up. Baseball was our big thing. With Maz, Steve Blass, Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, Manny Sanguillen, Richie Hebner, Al Oliver, Manny Alou, and big Dave Parker, the Pirates under Danny Murtaugh had become a force. The Steelers’ emergence remained a few years away.
The era’s music seemed customized for our lives. This song, ‘Psychedelic Shack’, by the Temptations, is from nineteen seventy. The lyrics are easy to learn and the beat carries me like a wave.
Today’s selection is streaming from nineteen seventy-one.
A year of personal change, this was the year I moved in with Dad. He’d just returned from Germany and was assigned to DESC in the Dayton, Ohio, area. We lived in Page Manor housing.
I was fifteen. It was the year I met my wife, although that didn’t become known to me for a few years. This song, ‘Signs’, by the Five Man Electrical Band, suited my milieu. Tesla later did a decent cover, but my stream is sentimental today, so I hung with the original.
I was a long-haired freaky person, so the words speak to me: “Signs, signs, everywhere signs. Blocking our scenery, breaking my mind. Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the signs?” I was rebelling against signs and the conformance they urged and demands they made. Signs still inundate our lives, and if there’s not a sign, there’s probably an app.
Michael Seidel, writer 