Category: childhood

Today’s Theme Music

Today’s song is right out of the American pop-rock scene of the nineteen seventies. It’s by a Canadian group who had a handful of hits and multiple excellent albums.

That’s the Guess Who. Love those rock band names. Today’s song is ‘American Woman’. People have argued about the lyric’s intentions since it came out. I once read one of the song-writers quoting John Lennon to the effect that a song’s meanings emerge after they’re recorded and that someone else needs to interpret them. I was writing a paper comparing the writing styles of Kurt Vonnegut and Mario Puzo at the time. I’d read some comments by them about how readers find meanings that the writers never intended. That doesn’t make those meanings wrong or illegitimate.

I was beginning to see and understand that in literature, art and music. People find their own meanings. It’s always fascinating then to hear people argue about these things as though they’re absolutes, and not shaped by own lives and dreams.

And it reminds me of eating food. People are always insisting to others, “Try this, it’s great, you’ll love it!” But tastes buds are also tastes, aren’t they? Sure. Try convincing others of that. They take your disagreement as a personal insult.

That’s what many Americans did with ‘American Woman’. They disagreed with what they saw as the song’s meaning and rejected it. I’ve had people tell me that they hate this song, because it was about hating America to them.

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Today’s Theme Song

I was a racing fanatic when I was young. I followed NASCAR, Formula 1, Indy, Can-Am, Trans-Am, SCCA amateur racing, and sports cars racing, such as LeMans.

Nineteen seventy-three was a disaster for the Indy 500. Rain delayed the race. Several fatalities happened in practice and in the race. Among them, Swede Savage was killed. ABC Sports was showing the race. They put a montage of images together about the race and used James Taylor’s song, ‘Fire and Rain’, as the soundtrack. Gordon Johncock, in a Patrick Racing Eagle-Offy, was eventually declared the winner.

At the same time, I’d moved out from Mom’s house, and in with Dad. He’d been in the USAF. We lived in Ohio, at Wright-Pat, but he retired, and he and I moved south, to West Virginia. We lived with someone else for a bit until we got a place. It burned down within a month of moving in. All our possessions were gone. Among the items burned was the check to the insurance company. Nothing was insured. It wasn’t a good start.

I’d had a crush on a girl, Susie, and she liked me, but moving away ended all of that. The song ‘Fire and Rain’ had a line, “Susanne, the plans they made put an end to you.” I took that personally when I heard that song during that tragic race. I knew Susie and I had changed. Never very socially engaged, in a new school with a curriculum that was a few years behind what I knew, I became more withdrawn.

I knew the song from its nineteen seventy release. That’s when Susie and I started hanging out together sometimes. Its connection to the tragic and disastrous nineteen seventy-three Indy 500 and my life changes shifted the way I think about that era, and that song. Yet, the song is a comfort. Although I emerged more withdrawn, I think I emerged more thoughtful, mature and independent. But, now, from the vantage that times’ passing can give, I see, too, that I became more emotionally detached, and I remain like that.

This is not what I thought I’d share today. I guess it just comes from where I’m at in the moment.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

This song was originally performed by a small, little known group called the Beatles. The song itself was written by an obscure songwriter named Paul McCartney. I think he may have written one or two other songs that also charted as a hit somewhere. None come to mind.

I preferred the cover of this song by a guy name Joe Cocker. Not many people are familiar with his work but he had a minor hit with his cover of this song, ‘She Came in Through the Bathroom Window’, in nineteen seventy. I find it a soothing song to stream while tramping about. Cheers

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Today’s Theme Music

In these through the looking glass sort of days, I think today’s song is appropriate. Besides, I like its slow beat and long crescendo sort of style as it builds toward a conclusion.

‘White Rabbit’ was written by Grace Slick in the mid nineteen sixties. She and Jefferson Airplane released it in nineteen sixty-seven, and it became a hit. More, the song became forever associated with that era and the psychedelic movement. In me, an eleven-year-old growing up in America, was inspiration to think more and challenge beliefs and opinions, but it also fired my creativity. The song references Lewis Carroll’s characters from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking Glass’ and discusses sensory distortion with those characters. The lyrics employ the logic that I always enjoyed, an encouragement to look at the world differently.

Of course, its drug overtones and association with drugs through popular culture worried mom. Still, I like streaming it in my head as I walk about, especially the way that Grace sings, “If you go chasing rabbits.”

It’s a treat to find this YouTube offering from the Smothers Brothers. Loved that show.

The weirdest thing for me now about Grace Slick and this song was that she was just four years younger than mom, and Grace is now seventy-seven years old.

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Today’s Theme Music

I was listening to Uriah Heep for years. My wife didn’t know anything about them but began listening to my albums extensively while I was on a fifteen-month unaccompanied tour to the Philippines a year into our marriage.

Like a lot of albums from that era, I played the whole album extensively. That’s how it was done in my youth. We had one segment, it seemed, who liked to load and listen to forty-fives. I was of another school. We put on one side of the thirty-three LP, listened to it, turned it over and listened to the other side. As my memory functions, that means that I will often automatically recall and begin streaming the next song from the album in my head.

Now, of course, with downloads, it’s way different.

Originally part of their ‘Demons and Wizards’ album, Easy Livin” was a song released by Uriah Heep in 1972. It became their only U.S. hit, and only reached something like the high twenties on the top forty playlists. I don’t think I ever hear it, or anything else from Uriah Heep, played on the radio. But this one, with its hard pressing guitar, fast pace, quick bass and spread of organ has taken a place in my heart.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s song is another hit from Wayback because I’m thinking about progress. This one, ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair’), was written by John Phillips but released by Scott McKenzie in 1967.

The song attracts me today because I heard it on the radio this morning. Some of the lines include, “All across the nation, such a strange vibration, people in motion. There’s a whole generation, with a new explanation. People in motion.”

Yes, I thought. That’s one of the things about the last Presidential election in the United States. Donald Trump preached a movement back. He appealed to people stuck in time. They weren’t in motion and weren’t moving forward. If they were moving, they were going backward to when men had more rights and white men had the most rights and privilege of anyone, and the wealthy were on pedestals as capable people. While these voters and supporters wouldn’t say they’re against these things, the man they selected is against regulations that protect people, animals, the environment, and the poor, sick and needy. Tearing down the public school system through Betsy DeVos isn’t a move forward, as that billionaire who never attended a public school will try to do. He’s gutting every system save defense while he promises new jobs and to rebuild the infrastructure. Yet, he also is going to cut taxes, reduces revenue, so there will be no money to pay for that infrastructure. He preyed on them with fear and promised he will build a wall to protect them. The Trump Wall will be beautiful, he claims, a big beautiful wall.

Many of those voters are in impoverished areas where industry has disappeared or pay minimum wages. The areas are dominated by elderly people, and the disability rates for these area are higher than the national average and increasing at a faster rate. These are the very people that the social net Trump is tearing about helps the most. Trump said he was draining the swamp and that he would change business as usual. His attack on Syria and his selection of wealthy cronies and family members to staff his White House show very much that it’s still a swamp. He criticized Obama for golfing too much while he golfs almost every weekend.

He is not the path forward. I’m going on without him and his supporters. Yes, the song may be fifty years old, but the sentiment that there are people moving forward and causing change is older yet. Yet, for some, it’s all new, strange and dangerous.

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Today’s Theme Music

I’m doing more streaming out of the Wayback Machine. This morning, we jump back to the year of my high school graduation, 1974.

Ah, exciting times. Vietnam. Nixon. Whip Inflation Now. Watergate. Cold War. ‘The Godfather’. ‘The Exorcist’. Eight track and cassette tapes. Princess phones, wall phones and extra-long telephone cords were in vogue.

Cable television viewership was rising. Microwaves were riding in on the first wave of availability. Companies were messing around with smaller computers but they were still focused on business. VCRs, DVDs, and Compact Discs were all in the future, as were Microsoft and Apple. There were still two Germanys. No European Union. Cell phones were just being used for the first calls but they were huge, expensive, heavy clunkers.

We were still recovering from the oil crisis of 1973. The national fifty-five miles per hour speed limit was upon us. The Phantom F-4 was our front line fighter, along with the F-111. The F-16 was still a prototype, and the F-14 was just entering service, with the F-15 coming along behind it. The Expos still played in Montreal, the Nationals didn’t play in Washington, and the Rockies and Marlins were still dreams.

From that stew, we have the Troggs with ‘Wild Thing’. I loved the song’s use in the film, ‘Major League’, in 1989. Charlie Sheen played Ricky ‘Wild Thing’ Vaughn, a Cleveland Indians pitcher. Of course, the Troggs hit was a cover of a song written, recorded and released in 1965 and the song in the movie was a cover by X.

So, here we go, a 1965 song, 1974 hit, from a 1989 movie, in which it was covered by a punk band, enjoyed in 2017.

Isn’t technology grand?

 

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Today’s Theme Music

I awoke with this song stuck in my head. It wasn’t the song I had in mind for today.

Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote ‘One Less Bell to Answer’ in the 1960s. The ‘Fifth Dimension’ had a hit with it around 1970.

The 1960s and 1970s was a great era of music. We had surfer music, blues, R&B, folk, psychedelic, country and western, and the British Invasion all being blasted from our AM radios. Many of the acts appeared on television and music shows, like ‘American Bandstand’ with Dick Clark, or ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’. 

Oddly, the song is connected to a time of transition for me. That gives me pause as I wonder why the song is stuck in my brain today. My family lived in the Pittsburgh, PA, area, having moved to that area in the late 1950s. We had lived in a brick duplex in Wilkinsburg. My aunt and her family lived next door to us in a like duplex. Her son, my cousin, was my age. We were best friends for a long time.

His family moved to a new housing development in Penn Hills in the 1960s. We also moved there a few weeks later. I ended up living about two blocks from him.

Meanwhile, though, my other friends remained in Wilkinsburg. I made it a habit to return to visit them. I usually rode my bike the miles between the two locations. Then my bike was stolen and I walked.

But my friends changed. I no longer felt a part of them and moved on. That’s why it’s interesting this song is stuck in my head this morning. Between my dream and my writing and this song, I wonder what conference is going on in my subconscious mind.

Here’s Marilyn McCoo and the Fifth Dimension, performing ‘One Less Bell to Answer’ on Soul Train.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

My wife reminded me of this one. It came out waaaayyyy back in the 1960s. That seems like three lifetimes to some, and yesterday to others. It’s like the day before yesterday to me.

The Isley Brothers wrote it, but this cover, by The Human Beinz, is the one I know. The Human Beinz release made it to the Top 10 in 1968. My wife called it the ‘no-no’ song. Its real title is ‘Nobody But Me’, but listening to the lyrics, it’s easy to understand her confusion. They sing no thirty-four times in a row. Featuring a fast, jaunty beat with lively bass, the words and melody are easy to learn. My little sister likely doesn’t recall this, but I used to sing this song to her; it amused me as a twelve-year-old jerk to sing, “No, no, no, no no, no no,” to a toddler.

The song streams well on a wintry March walk.

 

 

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Today’s Theme Music

Man, I’ll tell you what, the music emerging during the 1960s and 1970s was part of an amazing scene. Listening to those old songs give me a lift. This particular group, song and album were polarizing. When Mom heard me listening to this, she asked, “What is that you’re listening to?”

“Black Sabbath.”

Two words which probably did little to calm her. “Black Sabbath?”

“Yes. This is ‘Paranoid’.”

This woman who enjoyed Barbra Streisand, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, the Ink Spots, Platters, Nat King Cole, and on and on, studied me for seconds with mild distaste. Announcing, “It sounds paranoid,” she returned to her housekeeping routine and then called back, “Turn it down.”

Turn it down was something I’d hear a lot in those days.

Here we have it, a little gem called ‘Paranoid’, with Ozzy Osbourne on vocals, Tony Iommi on lead guitar, Geezer on bass and Bill Ward playing the drums, from 1970.

Get out your air guitar and turn it up.

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