Category: memories

Monday’s Theme Music

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,

They’ll all look at me and they’ll say,

Hey look at him and where he is these days.

When life is hard, you have to change.

I heard the song the year it was released. I thought the lyrics haunts the shadows of our existence. We strive to live, and some attempt to make a difference, but we’re such small drops of beings in such a huge ocean of beings. The song’s lyrics seemed sharp as volcanic rocks when Shannon Hoon, the group’s singer, died three years later. He’d been fighting addictions and substance abuse. He had to change, but couldn’t. Happens to a lot of us.
In the era of the Internet of Things, change is a speeding variable to modern life. See an actor and wonder, like the lyrics, where is he/she these days? To the Google machine to see. No, they’re not dead; they just faded away.
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Saturday’s Theme Music

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.

 

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

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.

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Sunday’s Theme Music

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.

 

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Friday’s Theme Music

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.

 

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Thursday’s Theme Music

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.

 

 

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

Tracy Chapman’s first album came out while we were living in Germany. This song, “Talkin’ ’bout A Revolution,” was one of several favorites from the album. We quickly became Chapman fans, and her second album cemented her status in our minds.

“Talkin’ ’bout A Revolution” seems apropos for this mild winter Wednesday. The White House released its budget. Since a budget was signed a few days before its release, the WH budget does little as far as being a law, but it provides insights into their thinking, and the thinking seems to be feed the rich, starve the poor, cut the arts, and increase the world’s largest military and nuclear forces into a larger force. Depressing thinking.

I think Chapman understands the gist:

While they’re standing in the welfare lines
Crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation
Wasting time in the unemployment lines
Sitting around waiting for a promotion

h/t azlyrics.com

In short, as larger numbers of common Americans have less to gain by maintaining the status quo, and the status quo moves into more conservative modes that favor wealthy individuals and corporations, there’s less vested interest for the multitudes to maintain the status quo.

There will eventually be change. History shows that revolution and change is a dance. The time and beat vary, as do the moves. Sometimes it’s a structured box step, forward, sideways, backwards as changes take place.

That seems to be the dance we’re doing now.

 

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Monday’s Theme Music

Today’s theme music comes by way of yesterday’s choir performance. The Rogue Valley Peace Choir performed as part of an afternoon called one voice. Participating with RVPC were four peace choirs from Portland and Eugene, Oregon, and California.  It was an enjoyable afternoon. One of the songs presented is the well-known “La Bamba.”

An old Mexican folk song, I learned of it from Ritchie Valens release. It came out two years after I was born. He was dead by then, so part of my maturing process was hearing about this song (and his other music), learning about why Richie Valens didn’t perform any more, and learning about the plane crash in which Valens, Buddy Holly, J.P. Richardson, and the pilot, Roger Peterson, were killed.

Though Valens died two years into my life, a movie of his life, “La Bamba,” starring Lou Diamond Philips, was released in 1987. Los Lobos performed “La Bamba” for the movie, sparking a new appreciation for the song and Richie Valens.

Turn it up and sing along. Happy Monday.

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Sunday’s Theme Music

Many of you know this song because it’s one of those ubiquitous tunes that started during one era, and gets pulled out and employed to make a point.

The song is “The Beat Goes On,” originally by Sonny and Cher. Sung in a flat, almost monotonous style, it features words and stanzas that reflect superficial changes even as certain defining trends of an era continue. “Drums keep pounding a rhythm to the brain.” “Cars keep going faster all the time. Bums keep asking, hey, buddy, do you have a dime?”

Yes, cars are getting faster. We don’t call them bums, hobos, or panhandlers any longer, but there are still people out there asking for money, usually more than a dime, because a dime just doesn’t buy much in these times.

Here it is, from 1967.

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