Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Streaming from my childhood once again. I enjoy this song for its organ solo. Because of that, I prefer the long version. Thinking about the words, there aren’t many verses in the song. Most of us know the title lines: “Hold your head up.”
Here’s Argent, with Rod Argent (formerly of The Zombies, which must count for something) on keyboards.
I’ve always enjoyed this song’s beginning. A chorus, a softly strumming acoustic guitar, and then a gentle French horn, each remarkable by themselves but coming together to set you up in an introspective mood.
When I first heard it, I thought, “Is that a French horn? Who is playing it?” Because a French horn isn’t part of the Rolling Stones’ typical composition. Later, there’s organ and piano, and wondered, “Who is on those?” I learned it was Al Kooper on them, along with the French horn. Pretty cool.
The song is, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” a well-known Rolling Stones song from that terrific album, Let It Bleed. I like the song’s story-telling style, how it touches on different political and social elements of that period, rising rises from a reflection on a female addict into a rousing anthem for rebellion and struggle.
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need
It’s a stirring rallying cry: try, and you might find that you get what you need, and it may not be what you thought it was.
Although this song is about a man’s relationship with a woman, I often thought of it in conjunction with my employers. “I have become cumbersome to this job.” Hah. Or, they’d become cumbersome to me. As the song says, walls were being built. And sometimes, I thought, despite the balance, this job experience has become cumbersome.
Here’s Seven Mary Three with “Cumbersome,” 1994.
America on Coffee posted a piece about Sister Sledge and “We Are Family.” Their post triggered a memory landslide.
The song came out in 1979. The Pittsburgh Pirates adopted it as their theme song. Led by Willie Stargell, they chased down a World Series championship.
Personally, I ended one life chapter and resumed another. I’d left the military to buy a restaurant and attend college in October, 1978. It didn’t work out well, so I headed back to the military. Preparing to leave for my assignment at Randolph-Brooks AFB in Texas, my car, a signal orange Porsche 914, burned up in the driveway. Terrific. I flew out alone to live in the barracks and save some money. My wife would fly out to join me in a few weeks.
I’d arrived at R-B AFB and was in transient quarters when Pittsburgh took on Baltimore in game seven of the World Series. It was a beautiful fall day in Texas. I listened on the room’s AM/FM clock radio as Pittsburgh won the game and the championship. The following Monday, I resumed my military career and kept going until I retired in 1995.
I like songs about change. This particular song, “Change,” by Blind Melon, has lyrics that cling to my dreamer’s mind.
So I want to write my words on the face of today.
And then they’ll paint it
And oh as I fade away,
Hey look at him and where he is these days.
When life is hard, you have to change.
Getting old
Getting gray
Getting ripped off
underpaid
Getting sold
Second hand
AC/DC rocked us through the lessons of being in a rock band in their song, “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll).” For most of us, short of being some amazingly talented person or born to wealth, it’s a long way to the top no matter what we’re trying to do.
Gotta love the bagpipes.
Ever hear about others’ success and feel that green-eyed monster called jealousy choking you? Yeah, it happens to me. Made me think of the Black Crowes’ song, “Jealous Again.” Released in 1990, I picked the album up after coming back to America in 1991. I have a Sony two hundred CD player. The player divides the CD into eight sections. I set one section aside as part of my current hits catalog. It was a good section, and I enjoyed putting it on shuffle while I worked and fooled around in the house. I enjoy this particular song because it features a throwback sound to me, like something out of the late sixties or early seventies on the pop rock side of music. Good song to sing as you wonder about and ponder life.
Thinking about music, I know some music because it pervaded popular culture and the American music, television, and movies. That said….
Ever reach that point where you shout, “Enough is enough!” Then you vow to change things. Change hopefully arises from that determination. As deaths, revelations, and accusations flew after last week’s high school mass murders, this song sprang into my music stream. Two great singers and performers, Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand combined to sing “No More Tears (Enough is Enough)” in 1979, during the peak of the disco phenomena. It starts as a slow ballad, but then erupts into a defiant stance.
I admit, I cringed a little, listening to this. Disco just isn’t my thing. Sorry.
REO Speedwagon’s Hi Infidelity album was big news when we arrived to serve at Kadena AB, Okinawa, Japan, in 1981. I’d written about that album and a few of their songs off that album before.
REO had been around awhile, and I’d like some of their earlier music, so their success pleased me. This song, “Roll With the Changes,” was one of their earlier songs that I enjoyed. First, it’s from the album, You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can’t Tuna Fish. Yeah, silly title, but it appealed to my silly nature.
The refrain from that song, though, “Keep on rolling,” became one of my personal battle cries as things happened in the military and in my life. Yeah, shit happens, but keep on rolling. Adapt and adjust, and keep on rolling. Short story submitted and rejected? Keep on rolling. Mission issues? Keep on rolling. Typhoon? Keep on rolling. Writer’s block?
You get the idea.
Let’s start with a wall of sound to blow these thoughts down, the thoughts that arrive after another mass shooting hits the news, another school’s day marked in red.
We’d just returned from living in Germany for four years, courtesy of our favorite uncle, when this song was released back in 1991. Another time? Well, we’d gone to war and were going to war back then, and we’re at war now, so nothing changed there. The Berlin Wall was torn down back then, a great moment in history, but the American border wall is being expanded this year. We thought the nuclear threat was diminishing because the U.S.S.R. had dissolved, but here we are, moving closer to midnight on the Doomsday clock twenty-six years later. Crime was higher then than now, but mass shootings were lower in 1991 than they are in 2018.
The worst mass shooting in 1991 the Luby’s shooting in Killeen, Texas. The gunman killed twenty-three people that day. It was the worse mass shooting in the U.S. at the time. It’s been surpassed. We’ve had five worse mass murders by a single shooter since then, including February 14th’s shooting in Parkland, Florida. That one, at a high school, ranks number one in the number of murders at a high school shooting in America, passing Columbine’s 1999 murders of thirteen people.
Let’s listen to Metallica with “Enter Sandman” and think about our national nightmare.
Michael Seidel, writer 