Category: memories

Today’s Theme Music

Life is but a roller coaster, you know? One hour you’re up, the next hour finds you on the ground. We flutter from ecstasy to frustration, coping with drugs, alcohol and other escapes.

Love, wow, love can be the wildest roller coaster. The Ohio Players covered it in song, “Love Rollercoaster,” in nineteen seventy-five. I enjoyed the song when it came out, along with a few other million people. It became one of those ubiquitous songs, played in clubs and on the radio twenty-four/seven.

Besides being one of the anthems of nineteen seventies America, “Love Rollercoaster” is burdened with an urban myth. Not too long into the song is a scream. I never thought much about the scream, considering it part of their presentation, but others assigned serious reasons behind the scream, like people or animals being killed or injured. After explaining what caused the scream (one of the singers – surprise!), the Ohio Players embraced a vow of silence about the song, refusing to talk about the scream.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers later covered it. I enjoy their version, but, being a traditionalist, I stayed with the Ohio Players.

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Today’s Theme Music

This is one of those songs from my second spring.

The song came out in nineteen seventy-three, which was the spring of my adulthood. Seventeen, I was living in West Virginia with my father. He was newly retired from the U.S. Air Force. Then entering my senior year of high school, I was finding love and thinking about the future beyond classes. Nothing was working out as planned, so I was winging it, the process by which I’d end up living my life: just wing that mutha.

“Ballroom Blitz,” by Sweet, nicely captures and conveys the chaos and pathos of that period as hormones and emotions took over, and I impatiently pursued life.

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Today’s Theme Music

I woke up in a Foghat state of mind.

I’d had an exciting and interesting dream about a recent dream. Without disclosing more, it was tremendously uplifting, bolstering my self-confidence to scary levels. I will note that I dreamed about the number eight again, which makes, unofficially, but what I can remember and enumerate, seven times. I’m waiting to see if I’ll dream of eight an eight time to end the series.

Back to Foghat. Those of you of certain ages and inclination will remember this song. “I Just Want to Make Love to You” is a blues staple that’s been well-covered by some great artists. But I encountered Foghat’s version first. It was nineteen seventy-two, and I was sixteen, a wonderful combination. By then, I was enamored with rock and guitars. Foghat’s cover of this song opens with rocking guitars, and doesn’t let up. What else needs said?

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Today’s Theme Music

Ah, love songs. I love them, especially when one side is singing to the other, attempting to sway them to stay together.

Such is what I take from this song, “Buddy Holly,” by Weezer. It came out in during my second or third spring, in nineteen ninety-four. I always understood a few refrains:

Oo-ee-oo I look just like Buddy Holly
Oh-oh, and you’re Mary Tyler Moore
I don’t care what they say about us anyway
I don’t care bout that

~ h/t AZLyrics.com

It’s the rest of the song that always mystified me. Fortunately, we moved into the Internet age, where Google searches and various websites, like AZLyrics, are able to clarify the words.

Sing along if you know them. As a bonus, Spike Lee directed the video. Fun stuff.

 

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Can You Remember?

On this day, the moon landing took place.

I remember it. I was a newly-minted thirteen-year-old. I watched the historic event downstairs. Downstairs was the cellar, or basement, as we called it, in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania. That’s where the family room, laundry room, garage, and my bedroom were located. It used to flood when it rained hard. Fortunately, the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, suburb only experienced rain about half of the year.

The lights were off in the family room, and cool air bathed the space. Sitting on the couch, the one that used to be upstairs before we bought new living room furniture, I watched Eagle land on the moon on a big Magnavox console color television. I always thought the television was stolen and purchased from a fence. Even when new, it had a small area in the upper right corner where the picture tube – televisions had picture tubes, back then – appeared cracked. At least, what it showed was a distorted bubble of rainbow colors.

It was good enough to watch the moon landing, though. There wasn’t even a need to rotate the outdoor antenna or adjust the rabbit ears. All three major networks were carrying the event. We only had the three, then. Cable news wasn’t carrying it, because cable hadn’t proliferated around the nation like a blackberry bramble gone wild, and there weren’t any national cable news channels. They were still in our future.

We were excited about the future, despite what was happening and had happened. Perhaps I was only excited because I was young. The Vietnam war still continued, and Nixon was in the White House. Watergate was still a few years away. So was our first gasoline crises since World War II. Microwaves were only emerging, and we mostly played music on forty-five and thirty-three R.P.M. vinyl records. We also listened to music on radios, especially in our cars, especially A.M. It was pretty impressive that our old Dodge had a push-button radio. Later on, after the first man walked on the moon and made his famous utterance, I went outside and gazed up at the stars, wondering what the future would bring.

All in all, it was a pretty cool night.

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A Drink of Fun

The young man walking toward him looked like a tall drink of fun. He wondered what the man was really like.

He’d once been a tall drink of fun, he rued. Well, not a tall drink, but a tumbler of fun. More like a shot, really.

He’d been a short shot of fun.

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Today’s Theme Music

Woke up feeling like some Squirrel Nut Zippers.

I began listening to them in nineteen ninety-seven. I was working for a medical defice startup called P.A.S. in Palo Alto. A young co-worker introduced me to the S.N.Z. sound with the second album, “Hot.”

I became particularly fond of “Hell.” It was a good song to sing along to while seat dancing  when I was stuck in the SF Bay Area traffic. I still smile when I hear this song.

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Today’s Theme Music

Going to the NCO Club and Open Mess in the middle of the nineteen eighties, I heard a lot of music I would never otherwise encountered. “You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)” by Dead Or Alive is one of those songs. Now, whenever I hear it, I think, do young people know what’s meant to spin round like a record? It reminds me of expressions like, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” When I was young, I wondered, who’s going to give me a horse, and why shouldn’t I look at it in the mouth? Do horses do something to you if you look them in the mouth?

From nineteen eighty-five, let’s spin this thing. Gotta love the electronic sound. So eighties.

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Today’s Theme Music

Modern technology hasn’t solved all our of ancient ills, but it’s facilitated widespread, easy entertainment. For me, in the sixties – that’s the last century, for those of you keeping score at home – that meant a transistor radio. Made in Japan, it was deplored as a cheap import, but it worked quite well in the hands of a nine or ten year old boy, until he took it apart to see what a transistor was.

Before I encountered the British invasion, before I discovered rock, I heard the Motown sound. A huge part were groups like the Four Tops, Temptations, and Supremes. I hadn’t appreciated what a large part they played until I looked up music for those groups last night. I was looking them up to refresh myself with their music, because we’re going to go watch the Four Tops and Temptations perform tonight. Should be fun.

As a reminder, here are the Four Tops with “Reach Out (I’ll Be There),” from nineteen sixty-six. It’s a sweet sound.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

Summer brings to mind the parties orchestrated during my military years. We had good parties every where, legendary parties. Part of that was being with good people.

Doug was one of those good people. I was stationed with him at Kadena AB on Okinawa. Our parties at his house began modestly and then mushroomed into block parties. Parties could be declared for anything from the end of an exercise or operational readiness inspection, to holidays and promotions, to “just because.”

Ad hoc teams were established for music, libation, food, set-up, and games. At the height of the parties, we had four or five sets of Bose 901s set up. The music was cranked up. One of the songs that had to be played was “I Want You to Want Me,” from “Cheap Trick Live at Budokan.”

Doug loved that song. It was one played later in the evening, after the most sensible and sober people had departed. Then, up went the volume, and out came the air guitars.

I think of Doug often, especially when hearing this song. I’ve only seen him once since leaving Okinawa, when we encountered one another during exercises in the Middle East, but the memory of him burns bright.

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