Today’s Theme Music

This is the only song I’m familiar with by this artist.

His name is Tom Cochrane. The song is “Life Is A Highway.” The song came out during the last century, in nineteen ninety. I like writing, saying and thinking expressions like, “the last century.” Of course, for some, this has been their only century, so far. We don’t know how far they’ll get. They might be looking back on these times while thinking, “Remember two hundred years ago? Wow, I was only seventeen but I thought I knew it all.”

Or, maybe not. Oregon’s oldest woman on record died recently. One hundred ten years old, Birdie Johnson still only knew two centuries, yet consider the significant changes she witnessed in her lifetime.

On the other hand, advances don’t always progress as expected. The SF Chronicle recently addressed predictions they’d published back in nineteen ninety-nine. Flying cars again made the list. We keep expecting flying cars. Those cars still rolling on the ground were expected be getting seventy to eighty miles per gallon by now, so that was a strike. It was predicted that the wealthy would be living to one hundred fifty years old by now. That was considered a miss.

Too many cars and not enough houses for the SF Bay area was predicted back in ninety ninety-nine. That was considered on target, so they weren’t all misses. Yet, for all the predictions made that missed, humans still surged ahead in many areas that we didn’t expect. Yes, life is a highway. We start with birth and end with death, but the stuff in between might not be as predictable as we think.

Let’s just ride it.

 

Today’s Theme Music

Hey, it’s a holiday here in America, the one called Memorial Day. It’s a Federal holiday and pretty well accepted, so most will be celebrating it without protests or demonstrations and there will be plenty of Memorial Day sales going on, along with war movies. Although some consider it a very solemn day, and folks will be visiting graves and decorating them with flags and flowers, I think a celebration is required. What better way than with a song with Kool & the Gang called “Celebration?” After all, we’re celebrating their gift of the ultimate sacrifice to preserve our rights and freedoms.

From nineteen eighty.

Today’s Theme Music

Never been to Kathmandu, but thanks to Bob Seger, it’s a place I want to visit.

Seger was one of those hard-working people who became an “almost overnight sensation.” Starting in Detroit, he had a large regional following and a few hits, but didn’t make it nationally until after almost a decade of trying. I knew”Ramblin’, Gamblin’ Man,” but it didn’t make a great impression on me. The song that really touched me was “Night Moves.” That song was released when I was two years removed from high school and two years with the military. With it, I was hooked on Seger and sought his music. His “Live Bullet” album with “Turn the Page” remains one of my favorite live albums. As that song said:

Out there in the spotlight
You’re a million miles away
Every ounce of energy
You try to give away
As the sweat pours out your body
Like the music that you play

h/t to metrolyrics.com

I felt like Seger and the band poured it all out in that album.

But “Katmandu”, the song, has lyrics that appeal to me, too, that encourage me to chuck it all, and get the hell out of here, go to somewhere simple and quiet. Seger seemed to think that was Kathmandu.

The song was released in nineteen seventy-five, but I’ve included the “Live Bullet” version. Enjoy as you walk around this fine Sunday.

Today’s Theme Music

This protest song, from the nineteen eighties, counters what’s normal for rock, at least as it’s experienced in America. Sure, we have some invasion hits from the Brits, Germans, Dutch, etc., and more than a few from Australia, too.

This one came from Australia with a strong rhetoric against taking the Earth from the people who already inhabited it, along with choice rails against global warm and environmental destruction. Featuring a heavy base line, it also has a fat horn section, pretty unexpected in a rock hit in nineteen eighty-seven. But the lead vocalist’s voice and enunciation will never challenge anyone for smooth delivery.

Know the song? It made news again during the opening of the Olympics in Sidney in two thousand. Sure, it’s “Beds Are Burning,” by Midnight Oil, perfect for a walkabout on an unusually hot spring day – in North America.

Today’s Theme Music

Here’s a Friday two-fer.

I’d planned for a celebratory song today but this one dominated one of my dreams last night. “When the Levee Breaks” is an old blues song. I became familiar with it through Led Zeppelin’s cover of it in nineteen seventy-one.

In my dream, it was my wake-up song, playing every day on my radio at seven in the morning. I know this because I was explaining that to other people. I told them, I’d begun doing that in June, so I’d been doing it for a year. During that time, I’d found a new shortcut, I explained. While explaining that, I pointed out a window at a new white concrete highway that was alongside a shoreline. The sky was so blue and the sun was so bright, it awed you into silence. Vehicles were on the road. It looked like typical commuter traffic.

We joked a while about hearing that song everyday. I know it was “When the Levee Breaks” because one other asked, “What is that song?” Then he answered himself as I answered him, “”When the Levee Breaks,” by Led Zeppelin.” He nodded, laughing along as we spoke. He said, “It’s a good song. I don’t know if I’d want to hear it all the time.” I answered, “I only hear it in the morning.” He replied, “Well, even that might be too much, if it’s every day.”

I awoke from that and the other two remembered dreams feeling like a dark cloud had been lifted. You decide, though: will hearing this song every morning be too much?

 

Today’s Theme Music

…and some days, you get up, and you’re in this mood, you’re like…possessed by this restlessness, and you think, “All I want to do is have some fun. Is that too much to ask?”

Here’s Sheryl Crow singing about it. Really, it’s like an essay on a day at the bar, the car wash, and the people who are there. From nineteen ninety-four, “All I Wanna Do.”

 

Today’s Theme Music

The stream has shifted. Into the flow comes an all-time favorite by a little band called Derek and the Dominoes, with help from a guy named Duane Allman. Eric Clapton and Jim Gordon wrote the song, “Layla,” as a love ballad about Eric’s love for George Harrison’s wife, Patty Boyd. Duane entered the picture and changed the song to its more familiar rock sound.

Back in those days, I didn’t know about the confusion arising over the name of the group. I knew when I heard the song, I loved it and sought it out. I thought it was Eric Clapton playing, but if it was this guy, Derek, I didn’t care. Being a slow witted animal, I eventually grasped that it was Eric playing and singing, with help from the great Duane Allman – which explains the similarity to the Allman Brothers’ music of that period, right? It all eventually came together.

To me, this is a triumphant, feel-good song that ignites my creative energies. Pick up your air guitar. Time to jam.

Today’s Theme Music

The anti-folk music Beck came along around in nineteen ninety-three with ‘Loser’. I’ve always enjoyed its self-deprecatory sense of humor on display and a style I found laconic. I later learned – probably through Sarah and Vinnie on the radio – that this song’s lyrics arose when he was attempting to perform, and failed to get and keep the audience’s attention. “I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?” Beyond that, I found the song’s words and tone reflected disgust about our consumer world and its hypocrisy.

That spoke to me.

 

 

Today’s Theme Music

Mom gave this album to me for a Christmas present in nineteen seventy-three, a gift made on my older sister’s recommendation.

I was ecstatic. I’d only heard and read a little about the album, ‘Quadraphenia,’ but I was an enormous Who fan at that point. Come on, they were fresh off ‘Tommy’ and ‘Who’s Next?,’ with the legendary, ‘Won’t Be Fooled Again.’ Their music spoke to a wannabe teenage rebel on the cusp of childhood’s end.

I played the bejesus out of this album, generally at a wall-shaking volume. This song, ‘The Real Me,’ was the opening track. While the song speaks to me with its lyrics and Daltry’s delivery, I’m enamored with Entwhistle’s flowing, active, dominating bass.

The cracks between the paving stones
Look like rivers of flowing veins
Strange people who know me
Peeping from behind every window pane
The girl I used to love
Lives in this yellow house
Yesterday she passed me by
She doesn’t want to know me now

h/t to Metrolyrics.com

I think it’s an appropriate song for the Internet age and the era of fake news. People hide behind anonymous posts and comments, putting forward false identities, deploying lies and false information to stoke fear and doubt, and further their causes.

Can you see the real me?

Today’s Theme Music

I often stream this song when I’m walking around on warm, sunny days.

‘The Way’, by Fastball, came out in nineteen ninety-eight, a particularly pleasant, enjoyable and successful time of my life. A jaunty song with several beat change-ups, it had easy to hear and understand lyrics. The song seemed to be telling a story about adults running away.

Anyone could see
The road that they walk on is paved in gold
And it’s always summer, they’ll never get cold
They’ll never get hungry
They’ll never get old and gray
You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere
They won’t make it home but they really don’t care
They wanted the highway
They’re happier there today, today

source: http://www.lyricsondemand.com/onehitwonders/thewaylyrics.html

Later, while driving around, I learned from a radio show that the song was about an elderly couple who ended up missing. The wife had Alzheimer’s and the man was recovering from brain surgery, yet, they made the amazing decision to drive to a festival. Several weeks later, they were found dead in a ravine, several hundred miles off course. Fastball speculated that they’d decided to go off in another direction.

Whenever I think of this song, and it’s often, it seems, because it gets stuck in the stream and keeps looping through, I think of an elderly couple in sunshine, running, laughing and playing, hiding from and evading their children as they enjoy a childlike day.

 

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