Here we go. Reference to what is a classic in your personal realm of taste is different from others. Age, era, and where and when you grew up all count into it, right? Other factor play into it. The net, what’s classic in my personal universe is foreign to you, and the reverse applies.
But this is a classic for me. It often streams into my head in conjunction with my muse. Muse might be properly plural here. I have multiple voices in my head. They all might belong to one muse, who likes doing other voices, or an army of muses. I don’t know. I sometimes wonder, when you die, what happens to the voices in your head, like your muses? I believe they go find someone else to reside in.
Here is my classic, a song for my muse. Several have covered it, but the classic for me is Santana, in nineteen seventy. I remember listening it on my little AM/FM clock radio, “with stereo.” Then I had it on vinyl, open reel, cassette tape, and CD.
Do you have daily theme music, or music that highlights an activity?
My daily theme music is often a reflection of a momentary lapse of reason, or a thought in the nick of time. Themes vary through the day, though, mirroring moods and events. Sometimes I find myself with the themes from the television series “Mission Impossible” or “Sanford and Son” in my head.
The smoke levels dropped today. The A.Q.I. remains listed as unhealthy, but it seems much clearer and more comfortable. The air temp was a comfortable seventy-six F under partly cloudy skies. That allowed me to walk in comfort.
I wrote in my head as I walked around town (actually designing the Epitomy, the starship serving as base in “Black Dust”). Bonnie Tyler’s song, “Holding Out For A Hero,” accompanied my thoughts. The song was in a movie you might have seen, “Footloose,” in nineteen eighty-four, but it’s been used for multiple campaigns. Bonnie puts a lot into singing the song, which was written by the talented Dean Pritchford.
I could use a hero this year, not just in my novels, but in life. Maybe I just place an ad: “Wanted: principled individual to save the world.”
Like later, in “Where’s the beef,” I missed out on what was going on with this song, because I was living elsewhere in the world. Contact with American pop culture was intermittent in those days.
I really first heard of it was when I visited Mom after returning to America. My younger sisters lived with her. They loved this song, “My Sharona.” I’d heard little of it, or the Knack. When I mentioned that to them, they replied, “I’m getting a little sick of it. It’s being played all the time.”
This was nineteen seventy-nine, the middle of the disco reign. “My Sharona” was nothing like disco of the time. It reminded me of the early Brit invasion stuff, like “Bang the Gong,” in structure, but with less textures.
The song never really caught fire with me. I was immune to its spell. But – there’s always a but, isn’t there? “Welcome to Heaven.” “I’m made it to Heaven?” “Yes, but, it’s not what you think.” Or, “I love you, but — ”
Yeah. Fear the “but.”
But, I awoke with a variation of “My Sharona” in my head. Here’s Weird Al Yankovic with his parody song, “My Bologna.” It was all in nineteen seventy-nine, when nobody needed to remind the POTUS not to look at the sun without proper eye-protection.
Today, Monday, August twenty-first, is the great eclipse day. People in Oregon, where I reside, are almost all beside themselves with anticipation. Today’s theme music is naturally related to the eclipse.
Numerous songs about the eclipse exist. I was drawn to “Eclipse,” by Pink Floyd, from their “Dark Side of the Moon” album. It’s a life-long favorite album, well, since I was seventeen, when it came out. The final words speak to me:
All that you touch
All that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
All that you love
All that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
All that you give
All that you deal
All that you buy
Beg, borrow or steal
All you create
All you destroy
All that you do
All that you say
All that you eat
And everyone you meet
All that you slight
And everyone you fight
All that is now
All that is gone
All that’s to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon
It’s a beautiful way of expressing that everything is connected while capturing the irony, everything is in tune, but the moon is eclipsing the sun, so…what has happened?
But then, awakening and looking out into the backyard, where sunshine first appears, I thought, here comes the sun, and wondered how many people at different times of this day have stood, watching the sky, and will say or think, “Here comes the sun.” With those thoughts, it became my choice for today’s music.
“Here Comes the Sun,” the Beatles, nineteen sixty-nine. It’s really appropriate for post-eclipse singing.
According to wikipedia.org, the last time a solar eclipse was visible in the continental U.S. was nineteen seventy-nine. I figured a song from that era would be appropriate for today. Using Everyhit.com’s retrochart, I came up with Queen, “Don’t Stop Me Now.”
I mean, these lyrics. Come on. How can you resist these lyrics?
Yeah, I’m a rocket ship on my way to Mars
On a collision course
I am a satellite I’m out of control
I am a sex machine ready to reload
Like an atom bomb about to
Oh oh oh oh oh explode
I’m burnin’ through the sky yeah
Two hundred degrees
That’s why they call me Mister Fahrenheit
I’m trav’ling at the speed of light
I wanna make a supersonic woman of you
We’ve begun the countdown to the end of the world, also known as The Doritos Great American Eclipse of 2017. I’ll keep posting right up until the last possible moment. Hope you survive; hope to see you on the other side.
In many ways, this reminds me of the other times the world has ended during my lifetime. One, of course, was when the Beatles broke up. Another, of less significance, but highly important, was when Coke launched New Coke. Our taste buds were thrown into a fizzy tizzy. What a nightmare.
Third on my list must be Y2K. It was such a disaster. We didn’t even have an official sponsor, or a good website. Despite knowing about it for years ahead of time, when it finally happened, it was soul-crushing and chilling. We went for days hunkered in our homes, watching television and old movies, eating junk food and microwaved pizza while awaiting the all-clear.
You know, when that all-clear was finally sounded, and we stopped out of the television’s glow and into daylight, we went right out and got a real pizza, and celebrated.
I want to reassure you all that if we survived those events, you can survive this eclipse. To keep you from getting too hopeful, I’ll play a little ditty that’s sure to depress you. From nineteen sixty-five, here is Barry McGuire, with “Eve of Destruction.”
* That’s not true. Doritos has nothing to do with the eclipse. It’s fake news that I made up.
I find myself singing a song, and then consider when I heard it, and where I was when it was released. With this song today, I thought, oh, when did this come out? I was living in Mountain View, California, wasn’t I? But that means the late nineties.
That couldn’t be right, but I look it up, and confirm, yes, this song is twenty years old.
No way, I react. It seems so recent and fresh. But it says it on the net, on Wikipedia, so you know it’s true.
Songs, politics, and technology are my time markers. When this song came out in nineteen ninety-seven, my email account was on Hotmail. My computer was a Zenith. I’d graduated to a monster VGA monitor. My hard drive was twenty meg, and I had both three and a half inch and five and a quarter inch floppy drives, along with a R/W CD drive. I think we were running about twenty-five MHz, and Windows 3.1. Bill Clinton was the POTUS, and the economy was flying. As an aside, Must See TV, with Friends and Seinfeld, filled the top ten television shows.
The U.S.S.R. had collapsed, and the Berlin Wall had come down. There was talk about the Peace Dividend. We thought there was a glorious future ahead of us.
Twenty years. As everyone finds out, significant changes take place in twenty years.
This was an interesting oddity that I found on the net.
Thirteen years old, I was just getting into groups like Cream. Cream was Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce. I knew who Glen Campbell was, of course; being in America in nineteen sixty nine, Campbell was difficult to avoid. He was well-accomplished, with well-known hit songs like “Gentle On My Mind,” “By the Time I Get To Phoenix,” and “Wichita Lineman.” By sixty-nine, he was hosting television shows.
This video is of Glen Campbell hosting a show and introducing Cream in nineteen sixty-nine. I never saw this video before today, and it’s definitely a ride on the wayback machine. Cream, so accustomed to playing stadiums with deafening levels of sound, seem strangely muted here. The contrast between their long-haired hippie appearance and Glen Campbell’s look is striking, and can easily be a metaphor for the difference in the America that was, and the America that was coming. Look at the set’s simple production, as well. It’s a far cry from “American Idol.”
Take a look to moderately far back in modern America, to nineteen sixty-nine, with Glen Campbell, and Cream.
I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t see how a man would do it, and I didn’t understand the attraction. I later learned the man was drunk, and thought the sex was a female.
That’s the thing with picking fruit: you have time to think.
Information was exchanged yesterday that the blackberries were looking good, and there were a lot. We were welcome to come and pick. We took up the offer this morning, driving the short distance to the property on the border between Talent and Phoenix.
As mornings go, it was normal, and glorious with sunshine, blue skies, and budding clouds. Summer’s heat had withdrawn to re-organize and energize, so the air was a comfortable seventy degrees. Most of the area’s wildfire smoke had hitched a ride out of the valley on the wind.
I’d heard about the sex with the chain-link fence on the radio during the drive. Neighbors had it on video. Seeing the video isn’t on my bucket list.
Starting out your berry picking is about looking around to find a ripe offering, sampling them to confirm your visual assessment, and then embracing the mechanics. Like blueberries, the key is color, and its easy release. If the berry is ready to be picked there’s no effort. Just a slight tug, and it rolls off the bush and into your hand. If they don’t come off like this, the product is likely to be sour.
Differences arise between blackberries and blueberries. While I enjoy their sweet juiciness, the largest difference from a picking point of view is that blackberries are in thorny brambles. There are many gorgeous gems hanging there, but getting to them is challenging without sacrificing some blood. Unlike my wife, I’m not a person willing to reach for a berry too far. That’s probably why she’s a better picker than me, collecting about one hundred and fifty percent of the produce that I acquire in the same period.
I’m not jealous; she’s just a better picker. Besides, once we get home, they belong to us, and are shared.
Shouting, “You’ll never take me alive, picking man,” the blackberries sometimes leap to freedom as I approached. The blueberries do it the same, so I don’t take it personally.
Unfortunately, some strange streams empty into this vacant space of thoughts. We had three television stations in southern West Virginia, where I went to high school for my final three years. All three stations featured a show called “Hee Haw.” It may be my imagination, but “Hee Haw” seemed to be on thirty hours a day.
“Hee Haw” was a syndicated variety show that featured country and western music, buxom women, and corny puns and jokes. Roy Clark and Buck Owens were the show’s hosts. One segment was called, “Pickin’ and Grinnin’.” Naturally, out there, my mind invited the segment in: “I’m a pickin’,” Roy or Buck would say, and the other would reply, “And I’m a grinnin’.” Then they’d play some music, stopping for a joke before resuming. They’d do this three or four times.
My mind mercifully cut the stream off after a while. Thereafter, I turned resources toward scenes I was contemplating, character development, and pacing and plotting.
It was a short pick, about an hour. We ended up with twelve pints. Of course, it was the year’s second pick, so we’ll freeze them, and be set for at least a few months.
Joni Mitchell wrote it, and sang it, but I remember the cover by CSN&Y.
The year of nineteen sixty-nine found me a budding thirteen year old rocking hippie wannabe living in a suburb of Pittsburgh, PA. My pants were bell-bottoms, and my thick hair was shoulder-length. My mustache and goatee were coming in without any prodding (Mom thought my face was dirty), and I was drifting toward the counter-culture.
I had some problems, though; can you be counter-culture and madly love cars like the Corvette, Jaguar XK-E, Ford GT, and Cobra, or the Porsche 917s and Ferrari 512s racing at LeMans, and the Can-Am and Formula 1 racers? That seems counter-counter-culture, as does being a Pirates fan and idolizing Roberto Clemente. But then, isn’t what what thirteen is all about, expanding your thoughts about where you’re at, what you’re learning, and where you’re heading?
Besides being my thirteenth year, nineteen sixty-nine is more frequently remembered in America for the Vietnam War, protests against it, President Nixon, the moon landing, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “Easy Rider,” “True Grit,” the Miracle Mets, and Woodstock, as in the Woodstock Music & Art Fair. I wasn’t there (at the fair), but I heard a helluva lot about it afterwards. Part of that was because of Joni’s song, so I offer it here to you, to remember or learn of that festival that began on August 15, forty-eight years ago.
Michael Seidel, writer 