Category: memories

Saturday’s Theme Music

It’s a quiet autumn Saturday morning, a perfect day to sip coffee and listen to some nineteen seventies era American rock. How ’bout Aerosmith, with “Sweet Emotion,” from nineteen seventy-five?

This one came out while I was going through technical training. I didn’t listen to music much during that period. I basically had a clock radio in my dorm room in the Triangle on Keesler Air Force Base outside of Biloxi, Mississippi.  I was there for two months, and then went to Wright-Patt for my first duty assignment, and married. With all this, it wasn’t until the next year, nineteen seventy-six, that I listened to Aerosmith.

In September of seventy-six, I reported for duty at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. “Sweet Emotion” was on Aerosmith’s “Toys In the Attic” album. I was on an unaccompanied tour and living in the barracks. I bought some stereo gear, and “Toys In the Attic.” It was available, and I knew it and liked it. I also bought Al Stewart’s “The Year of the Cat,” something by 10ccs, and Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life.”

Besides their hits of “Sweet Emotions” and “Walk This Way,” Toys had several songs I enjoyed, including “Sucking On My Big Ten Inch,” “Uncle Salty,” and “Toys In the Attic.” I listen to any of them, and I’m suddenly twenty-years old in the Philippines again.

 

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Friday’s Theme Music

Boy, do I remember first hearing this song.

Nineteen sixty-nine, thirteen years old. The Rolling Stones were one of the hottest, biggest rock groups around. And this song, “Gimme Shelter,” stopped me with its opening. Haunting, arresting, it gave me pause to hear what was going to come next, revealing intense, moody, and angry lyrics.

Just like nineteen sixty-nine.

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Thursday’s Theme Song

You know, when you keep your hopes alive, you keep believing, a change is going to come. Just today and tomorrow, and it’s the weekend, if that means anything to you. Fall is here in the Pacific Northwest, and winter is coming. Twenty-seventeen has built up its speed, and there’s every evidence it’s going to keep accelerating until it crashes into twenty-eighteen. Time flies; our lives fly. And we keep hoping for change.

I didn’t hear this song until long after its release. Someone covered it; I don’t know who. I didn’t know the song, and long after I first heard it, when the net finally come to be, I remembered it, bit by bit, and looked for it. Here it is, Sam Cooke, with “A Change Is Gonna Come, from nineteen-sixty-four. You gotta believe it, if you’re going to persevere.

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

This is a good rainy Wednesday song. It starts slow, and builds.

“Give Me One Reason” by Tracy Chapman came out while we were stationed in Germany in nineteen eighty-eight. Her style and voice struck me as astonishing. The lyrics are poetic and insightful. I find this song boils down the complexities of a relationship, and how currents and energies swim around words and hope. When all is said and done, just give me a reason to stay. I want you, and you want me, but I need a reason to stay.

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

Once again, I’m streaming music in via the Wayback Machine. This time, the rotary dial has spun around and landed on an Allman Brothers Band offering.

I spent hours listening to the ABA when I was in my teens, first on thirty-three R.P.M. vinyl, and then on cassette and open reels. I’d get prone on the shag-rug carpeting, lights off and the volume up, and let the music pummel me. I’d moved through those mediums seeking faithful fidelity, free of wow and flutter, and buzz and hum. Yes, I was insane.

“Ramblin Man,” written by band-member Dickey Betts, came out in seventy-three, when I was entering my senior year at high school. The song is off the album, “Brothers and Sisters.” A popular song, it’s probably one of ABA’s best known releases.

I offer it for your Tuesday pleasure, but it’s acceptable to enjoy it on other days.

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Today’s Theme Music

We saw George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers in concert last night, so I thought I’d play him today. Fabulous concert. He’s a helluva showman and an entertainer. The concert began with Barry McGuire’s recording of “Eve of Destruction” with the stage dark except for some blue lights. It ended with the star-spangled banner. Of course, all of their hits were played.

I didn’t know of Thorogood and the Destroyers (Delaware was later dropped) until the mid seventies, when he broke out and started garnering national attention. “Bad to the Bone” is hugely known and popular, and the band’s covers of old blues tunes became popular. I love their coverage of “Who Do You Love,” and that’s what I’m going with.

 

 

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Today’s Theme Music

An old fave. From an excellent album and nineteen eighty-five, here’s Annie Lennox and the Eurythmics with, “Would I Lie to You?”

I’d come back from Okinawa the year this was released, and was assigned to a mobility unit. We traveled a lot, mostly to Florida, but also Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, and Europe. I’d bought a new Mazda RX-7, and put over fifty thousand miles on it driving to temporary duty locations. The net result of that traveling, I’ve never seen this video until today. It’s, ah, interesting, with the story it told.

Side note: nineteen eighty-five was the year of my first computer. It used CP/M 86, had a tiny green screen, dual floppies, and ran at 4.77 MHz, but it was something. Using WordStar, I’d put it to learn how to write fiction, but mostly, I gamed on it.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s song is “Runnin’ With the Devil,” by Van Halen.

Why? I was writing a scene in my head as I walked through the town’s growing smoke. New wildfires was generating the smoke, and the winds had shifted…and you know how all that goes.

So, with walking, breathing smoke, and writing in my head, my mind started streaming “Runnin’ With the Devil.” VH-1 named this the ninth greatest rock song in history in two thousand nine. I know that after its release in nineteen seventy-eight, it became a jukebox staple in Airman and NCO Clubs and open messes around the world, and stayed there until at least my retirement, in nineteen ninety-five. Why not? The song has that Van Halen hard rock beat, terrific licks for air-guitars, and lyrics easy to understand and sing, in a style that was most could imitate. You know that when it came on in the clubs, many males immediately shifted their attention to singing along.

Feel free to sing along, too.

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Today’s Theme Music

A memory stays with me.

The lights are low and the music is loud. I’m with friends at one of their houses, in my late teens, in the military, essentially, an adult now tasting the spectrum of responsibility by doing whatever I wanted because I was now an adult, and adults can do whatever they want, aslongaswedon’thurtanyonebreakanylawsrulesorregulationsandshowupforworkontime.

I was a responsible rebel.

So this song, “Fox On the Run,” is playing. Someone asks, “Who is this?” I answer, “Sweet.” We shout to be heard.

He looks at me and says, “Sweet what?”

“Sweet,” I answer.

“Sweet what?” he asks.

Catching that he doesn’t understand as others laugh, I say, “The group is called Sweet.”

“Oh,” he says. “I thought you were saying sweet.”

“I was.” That fired a neuron onto a axon. From it, I proclaim, “We’re all always seeking the sweet spot.”

That gains laughter. “You’re crazy,” others agree.

“Probably,” I agree.

Here is “Fox on the Run,” from nineteen seventy-four. It’s by Sweet.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s theme song comes from last night’s activities. We attended the Rock the Resistance last night, an Indivisible fund raiser for Oregon District Two. Local talent performed. We have terrific local talent, like the Rogue Suspects, LEFT, and Girls Just Want to Have Fun. One of the songs performed was “Higher Ground.”

Written and recorded by Stevie Wonder in nineteen seventy-three, when I was still getting my eyes opened in high school, it’s an uplifting song, perfect for a fund-raiser supporting the “Resist!” movement. While dancing, singing along, and sipping a beer, I thought of the rest of the world. War in Myanmar. Flooding in Asia. Evacuations for Hurricane Irma. Eyes on Hurricane Jose. Texas and Louisiana recovering from Hurricane Harvey. Mexico recovering from an earthquake. Wars on going on everywhere, driving people from their lands into a search for safety, and wild fires burning in Canada, America’s Pacific Northwest, and California. It’s a mess, ain’t it?

It ain’t new. All these things have always been going on. War, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes have always been with us.

One hundred years ago, in nineteen seventeen, learning about other’s catastrophe and trying to help them out would have taken some time. Now, updates come by the second via digital channels, satellites, and social media, and connect us to one another.

Watching disasters and wars on my monitors and televisions while sipping coffee at home demonstrates how fast technology has outraced our thinking, culture, and politics. We’re together but isolated. We don’t need to be. Dare I say that we need a significant paradigm shift?

Yes. Technology is going to keep racing by. And look how much of it is conceived and designed in one locale, manufactured in another location, and sold and used in other places. We need each other. Meanwhile, countries are starting to man the borders to shut others out. It’s backward behavior. Fear drives many of these actions. Hatred contributes, and ignorance amplifies and sustains this backward behavior.

We’re one world. We’re one tribe. We keep spiting others, and end up spiting ourselves. Come on, people, we need to get our shit together. Time to start trying, and keep on trying, until we reach a higher ground. That’s the paradigm shift needed: we need to stop thinking in terms of nations, and think in terms of people, without regard for anything except that we’re all people.

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