Category: memories

Sunday’s Theme Music

Today’s theme music is “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to be Right”. Humming along with it as it flowed through my stream this morning during the routines, I thought about the song’s complex, grown-up nature.

I was sixteen when the song was released in 1972 and going through the standard processes involving discovering love and sex. Little did I know how complicated it could all be. The big lie still held about finding someone and falling in love, marrying for laugh, and growing old together. Big cracks were appearing in the big lie. Love and sex, as well as gender identity and sexual orientation are all more complicated than the big lie’s straightforward depiction. Then religion society gets involved – a black man and a white woman? Social norms add new pressures and dimensions.

That’s behind the song. He’s in love with another woman, having an affair and cheating on his wife. And the woman is having an affair with a married man. Both of those are taboo. The man understands that he has commitments. Needs change.

I’m not trying to defend him so much as think about how complicated love, sex, society, marriage and life can be. It’s not as clean and simple as the big lie leads us to believe.

Am I wrong to fall so deeply in love with you
Knowing I got a wife and two little children
Depending on me too
And am I wrong to hunger
for the gentleness of your touch
knowing I got somebody else at home
who needs me just as much

And are you wrong to fall in love
With a married man
And am I wrong trying to hold on
To the best thing I ever had

h/t to songfacts.com

Of course, the other part of this is what it would do to his wife if she discovered his betrayal, and what could result from that, nor what the guilt can do to him and his thinking and psyche.

Many performers and groups have covered this R&B classic, but that original voice and music is seared into my brain. Luther Ingram didn’t write it, but he delivered the sound.

 

 

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Saturday’s Theme Music

Today’s song blasted out of my dreams and into my thinking stream. The dreams were wild, all good things that made me laugh or stand tall as a conquering hero. Nothing undermining, and no anxiety. Great stuff.

So why did this 1985 ballad emerge from that dreamland? I think “Broken Wings” fits it well. Like the dream ended and this was the song that played for me as the credits rolled. It was cool.

BTW, I’d never seen the video until I checked it out today. I was in Egypt, living in a tent when the song was released, part of whirlwind year that had me in stationed in South Carolina, but visiting Jordan, Guam, Korea, New Jersey, Spain, and Egypt. Interesting year.

Here’s Mr. Mister.

 

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Friday’s Theme Music

Freddies dead
That’s what I said
Let the man rap a plan said he’d see him home
But his hope was a rope and he should’ve known
It’s hard to understand
There was love in this man
I’m sure all would agree
That his misery was his woman and things
Now Freddie’s dead
That’s what I said

Read more: Curtis Mayfield – Freddie’s Dead Lyrics | MetroLyrics

I was reading about another unarmed black man killed by another white man with a gun. In this case, the black man was killed by a Walgreen’s security officer as he was walking away, shot in the back, after the two exchanged words several times.

Reading about the man’s death as the holidays are fading and the decorations are taken down and put away inspired weariness about change’s creeping nature and questions of why so many others seem eager to kill someone because they’re a different color, or the things they said. Growing up in 1960s America, race riots and violence were a nightly news staple. I keep hoping for peace, equality, and justice.

From all that, I began streaming Curtis Mayfield, “Freddie’s Dead” (1972).

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Thursday’s Theme Music

As I’ve thought about what was happening and where I’ve decided to go, Peter Gabriel’s song, “Solsbury Hill” (1977) came to me. The song is about making decisions, taking risks, and changing, coming about when he left Genesis, the group he’d helped begin almost a decade before, to begin a solo career.

Many of the versus reflected his uncertainty about the decision.

To keep in silence I resigned
My friends would think I was a nut
Turning water into wine
Open doors would soon be shut
So I went from day to day
Though my life was in a rut
‘Til I thought of what I’d say
Which connection I should cut

Enjoy.

 

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Monday’s Theme Music

A simple song today, streaming an old favorite. This came out in ’72, when I was just getting my driver’s license, still in high school, and living with dad. Don’t know what kicked it into the stream this morning, but I’ve always liked its sound and energy.

Let’s enjoy some Led Zeppelin with “Rock and Roll”. Rock out 2018, rock in 2019.

Cheers

 

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Friday’s Theme Music

A friend was once singing today’s song, “Timothy”, by the Buoys, shortly after it was high on the pop charts. I asked him if he knew what this song was about, because listening closely, it seemed like it was about two guys eating the third one with them, Timothy.

I probably haven’t thought about the song since ’bout the time of that conversation in 1971. Recalling the song last night, I looked it up. Yep, it was about a cave in, and the two survivors eating the other, with the singer claiming that he must have blacked out, but he awoke with a full stomach.

Strangest to me, I learned that Rupert Holmes, who wrote and sang, “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” (1979), wrote “Timothy”.

That’s the net’s fun aspect, looking things up to answer, what the hell?

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Thursday’s Theme Music

Greeting my bedroom panther this morning prompted this song to splash into my stream.

“Said the mongoose to the cobra,” “See the panther, up in that tree?””

Yes, it’s Elephant’s Memory with “Mongoose” (1971).

Enjoy Thursday’s theme music during your holiday lull. Cheers

 

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

Today’s theme music is Live’s “Lightning Crashes” (1993).

I have several Live albums, but I find I must be in just the right mood to play them. It’s a very narrow space.

“Lightning Crashes”, though, came to me this week because one of my nieces gave birth to her third child. All this was shared on Facebook. Everyone is doting on the sweet newborn, including my mother, and there’s rich photographic evidence.  The newborn is Mom’s seventh great-grandchild. That juxtaposition of Mom holding this young new life invited “Lightning Crashes” into my stream and the circle of transference of life and existing. One dies, and one is born, and so it goes. There’s a lot of overlap as it happens.

 

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

Keeping it simple today.

I’m agnostic in my religious approach, with some new age and pagan shavings. Our house is lightly decorated for the holidays with a few Douglas Fir swags over the fireplace and front door, and a large wreath on one of the living room’s high walls. Each is lit by strands of small white lights at night. I like sitting in there and thinking of the centuries past, when darkness and cold descended, and people wondered what was to come. Gee, just like as it happens now, innit? I also sip a little mulled wine or wine with wassail, just to put me in the right mood, when I sit in there.

Perhaps it’s cheesy by some standards, but I like this rendition of Bing Crosby and David Bowie doing “Little Drummer Boy/Peace on Earth”. I was stationed in the Philippines when it came out in November, 1977, and didn’t see it for years. My assignment was due to end on December 28, 1977, and I’d go home then, and on to my next assignment, but the Flying Tigers, which was the servicing airline the military contracted, had an extra 747 available. They announced that seats were available for anyone who could get leave or process through to end their assignment, if their assignment was due to end in December.

I ended up on that flight, along with maybe a dozen other people. Landing in L.A., I found flights to Cincinnati to Charleston, WV, and took a bus for the final miles, arriving home just after a snowstorm, but still on Christmas Eve. I’d called my wife from Charleston to meet me at the bus station. That was the first she knew of my early homecoming. I think I was the only person who got off the bus.

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Monday’s Theme Music

Time for another visit with the Alan Parsons Project. This song, “I Wouldn’t Want to be Like You”, came out in 1977. I awoke with it bouncing around my stream, along with songs about rain. I went with Alan Parsons.

Enjoy.

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