Category: memories

Sunday’s Theme Music

We attended a show called “Million Dollar Quartet” at the Oregon Cabaret Theater last night. Great show, very lively. I was familiar with the music played but it was all from before my time. Still, it put me in a rock and roll frame of mind while I was walking to my writing today. Lots of songs streamed in, but the one that grabbed me was David Bowie’s “Suffragette City”.

I enjoy how the song cranks up with raucous overtones right from the start. It seems like both a conversation between the singer and others about a woman he’d met but also an internal conversation about a person reflecting on who he is, his sexuality, and where he’s going and doing. There’s a sense of a decision being made at a fork in the road. Most of all, though, it’s a rocking song and easy to sing. Love that hook, “Ahhh, wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.”

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Saturday’s Theme Music

It’s a Stevie Ray Vaughn Saturday. He’s one of those performers that I can say, I’ve never heard something that he performed that I didn’t like. His heart and soul were heard in his sound, no matter the venue or song. No matter what he performed, it seemed so electric and amazing, it seemed like he channeled a higher power.

Here’s SRV and Double Trouble with “Cold Shot”, live, 1985.

 

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A Muse Rides In

A dream began and ended. I slipped between the cracks of being asleep and awake and considered the dream.

My muses rode in our horses. There were five, all women.

 

And David Bowie’s song, “Heroes,” began playing.

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I’ve been having a series of nostalgic dreams about being happier and more contented. These dreams reflect my wry private observation about my life’s trajectory.  I’d followed an upward curve for decades, the kind that’s part of the mythology of working hard and being rewarded when really, it was partly being a beneficiary of being a white male with a modicum of sense in modern America. Sometimes there was a brief drop, and there were a few sharp spikes. Overall, it’d been up and steady. Now, I ride a plateau.

This dream was like that series, but sharper. It centered around me opening a business. I’d picked a location but was having buyer’s remorse and self-doubts. I walked around thinking, what to do, what to do. Was this really what I wanted to do? More, it didn’t seem like a good business idea. Friends, family, and business associates were present. As it grew clear that I was dissatisfied and bothered, they offered alternative ideas for the space and my business.

That triggered fond thinking about going to coffee shops and bakeries. I thought the space was perfect for that. Into the dream comes one of my old CEOs, enthusiastically reminiscing about life at a start-up, and coffee shops like this. Everyone was excited about that idea, and I awoke on the verge of a decision.

After thinking about that dream, I reordered myself to sleep.

Then the muses rode in.

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The five muses rode in and stopped. I had a profile shot of them in a line. They were looking straight ahead. I don’t know what they looked at it. It was then I realized they were my muses. I recognized the setting from the scene I’m working on in my novel.

Bowie’s “Heroes” began playing. IT would play on a continuous loop in the background for the rest of the dream. The song  was a live version from one of Bowie’s last shows.

The woman in the center was on a light brown horse. She dismounted. Her horse and the other muses went away. She transformed into one of my novel’s characters. The story-telling commenced. As her story spread out like I watched a movie, she said, “No, further back. This series of scenes needs to begin further back.”

So back we went, resetting the start of her part in this series. She began telling it again. It was like I was in a movie watching her.

There’s a lot to write today.

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As a final part of the dream sequences, I dreamed a dragon flew through me. Huge, it flew through my body and breathed fire, burning out any diseases in me.

As far as I know, I don’t have any diseases.

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Friday’s Theme Music

“Champagne Supernova” by Oasis was one of my top twenty songs of 1996. My first year of retirement after the military, I was working Palo Alto for a medical device startup. “Champagne Supernova” resonated with me because the words didn’t always have a cause and effect relationship; I saw the same lack of cause and effect in my life. I was just floating along, and things were happening.

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Thursday’s Theme Music

A car passed by as I walked in the wind, drizzle, and sun yesterday. One of the car’s windows were down, and the Bee Gees streamed out:

“You don’t know what it’s like.”

Naturally, my mind completed the song and then put it on a loop and added it to the day’s shuffle. I haven’t heard “To Love Somebody” in a long time. I think the last time was in a movie. It was released in the late sixties, before the Bee Gees became embedded with disco. I liked a lot of Bee Gees music back then. They had some tight harmonies.

So, from my ear worm to yours. Please, enjoy this on your Thursday. Cheers

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

I learned this song from the AM radio when I was very young. I began thinking about “The Name Game” this morning, but remembering “The Clapping Song,” I switched to it. I loved its rhythms and clapping when I was a child. Come on, they’re fun lyrics and easy to learn:

Three, six, nine, the goose drank wine,
The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line
The line broke, the monkey got choked,
They all went to heaven in a little row-boat

Clap-Pat
Clap-Pat
Clap-Pat
Clap-Slap

Clap-Pat: Clap your hand, pat it on your partner’s hand (right hand)
Clap-Pat: Clap your hand, cross it with your left arm, pat your partner’s left palm
Clap-Pat: Clap your hand, pat your partner’s right palm with your right palm again
Clap-Slap: Clap your hands, slap your thighs, and sing a little song; go:

My mother told me
If I was good-ee
That she would buy me
A rubber dolly

My aunty told her
I kissed a soldier
Now she won’t buy me
A rubber dolly

h/t to lyricsfreak.com

I didn’t know that Shirley Ellis sang it. Honestly, when I learned this song, it all came from that magical place called the radio. It wasn’t for a few years that I realized that those voices and music represented individual people. Yeah, I was a little slow. After hearing the song when I was older, I wondered about the age of a person who was being promised a rubber dolly but wasn’t being given one because she kissed a soldier.

 

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Monday’s Theme Music

When I heard “Share the Land” by the Guess Who, I knew that wasn’t Randy Bachman on the guitar. The style sounded different. Nothing against Bachman, who did some excellent playing with the Guess Who (like “American Woman”) and with BTO, but I really liked the guitar’s fast, fluid movements and high notes on “Share the Land.”

Because of that one song, I became a Kurt Winter fan. He died of kidney disease when he was fifty-one, but he left some wonderful performances to remember him. I like how Burton Cumming’s honky-tonk style piano in this song underscores Winter’s guitar work.

 

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Sunday’s Theme Music

This song, “Ramblin’ Man”, was recorded a year after Duane Allman died. I was a big Allman Brothers Band fan when he died after a massive motorcycle accident. “Live at the Fillmore East,” released on July of 1971, was one of my recurring go-to albums. A month after “Ramblin’ Man” was recorded, Berry Oakley, Duane’s friend and the group’s bassist, died in a motorcycle accident a few blocks from where Duane had his accident.

Dicky Betts sang “Ramblin’ Man,” which explained a lot for me. When I first heard it, I thought, boy, Gregg’s vocals sound a lot different on this. That song, though, captured the uplifting, rambunctious, rambling spirit I often felt while I was traveling. The pace feels faster with the song’s guitar solos, and the notes make me feel like I’m soaring on a wind.

It’s a memorable song, and has been used in many movies and venues. Here they are, the Allman Brothers Band with “Ramblin’ Man” from 1973, my junior year in high school.

 

 

 

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Saturday’s Theme Music

Soft rock isn’t my bag. I always enjoy that expression, ‘my bag’. When I was a child and heard it, I asked, “What’s that mean?” When adults explained it, I asked, “But why a bag?” Because we carry baggage, they explained. Took me a while to understand until a sixth grade English teacher clarified the whole metaphor.

Today’s soft rock is by Orleans. “Dance with Me” features a melodica solo. When I first heard the song, I thought, “Is that Stevie Wonder?” It’s one of those riddles that stayed with me through the years until I finally hunted down an answer. No, it’s not Stevie Wonder, it’s Larry Hoppen, Orleans’ lead vocalist, who committed suicide half a decade ago. He was sixty-one. I don’t know why he committed suicide. It seemed to be depression.

Of other Orleans’ hits, I much prefer “Still the One” (which Larry also sang) but this is the song that was streaming through me. Sometimes, I just take what I’m given.

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Weird Tales

Into our lives come weird tales. Everyone has them. They don’t happen often for me, and I’m happy about that, and they’re not very weird. One happened last night.

I feel asleep reading and watching television in the snug. In the recliner, I was streaming “Case Histories” on Amazon Prime with the sound turned low. I’d seen it before, so I was also reading “The Lies of Locke Lamore”. We had a high-wind advisory in effect. I wasn’t worried. Two cats were weighing me down against getting blown away.

At two A.M., I awoke. The first thing I realized was that the cats had abandoned me. Second, I saw that the Roku had reset and was going through its update music. Interesting. Next, I saw with a glance at the modem that the network had reset. Well, I thought, the wind storm had probably caused some ISP issues.

Seeing the time, I decided to go to bed. Turning everything off, I left the snug, and then paused. The interior door to the garage was on my left. Not ajar, but not pulled tight, I could see that a light was on in the garage.

My wife or I must have left it on after going in there on an errand, I speculating, opening the door. But when I opened it, it wasn’t the garage interior lights that were on, but the garage door light. You know how that works? We have a garage door opener. When you press the button, a signal is sent. Receiving it, the garage door opener turns on a light and raises or lowers the door. That’s the light that was on.

That light wasn’t on before.

Being a cautious and paranoid person, I backed away from the door while keeping my eyes on it. Opening the coat closet, I took out the heavy metal flashlight we hang in there for emergencies. Not only does it provide a strong beam, but it has a solid heft to it, and can be useful as a weapon. See where my thoughts go?

Flashlight on, I first flashed it around the house, and then turned on the main hall light, and checked the front door. Locked. Okay. Going into the garage, I checked the side door. Finding it locked, I went around the garage to confirm nothing was out of place or missing, and everything was in order. Everything was as it should be. My mind dislikes vacuums, so I guessed, there must have been a power failure. I checked the clocks on the kitchen appliances. They were correct. Nothing anywhere indicated a power failure, except, perhaps the network and Roku. Going around the house, I repeated the process of checking doors and windows to ensure everything was closed and nothing was missing. Everything was as it should be.

The garage door opener light is on a timer. It now went off.

I couldn’t recall the garage door light going on after power was restored before. Maybe I had a faulty memory. Sleep and I had parted company at this point. I returned to the snug and read until I fell asleep. Then, awakening at three, I went to bed.

The garage door light entered my dreams. I was investigating it and testing different theories of how the garage opener light went on in my dreams. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, showed up to help, but he was useless. In some weirder parts of my dream, the garage door mystery was discussed on MTV and everyone started eating jelly beans.

As an aside to the jelly bean part, we put up an Easter tree using pussy willows. They were placed in a glass vase filled with jelly beans to hold up the pussy willows. Now that Easter was over, I was allowed to eat the jelly beans.

The jelly beans, made by Brach’s, were pastel colors, and pretty. Their smell was reminiscent of sugar and marshmallows, drawing Easter basket memories up out of my youth. I tasted some jelly beans.

OMG, they were terrible. They tasted like sugar with a small effort to have a flavor like blueberry or cherry. I tasted different colors to see if I liked any. They didn’t have any black ones, which are my favorites. Of the colors presented, the orange ones had the strongest orange flavor, actually managing to overcome that sense I was only eating sugar.

Anyway, that’s my tale of the weird. It’ll probably be a few years before there’s another one. At least, that’s my hope.

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