This isn’t a song that I normally stream in my head. The cloud in my head is filled with ‘classic’ rock, with some R&B, Motown, Brit Invasion and Top 40 childhood memories. –
‘Push It’, by Salt N’ Pepa, was a hit in nineteen eighty-eight. It certainly left an imprint in my cloud, but then, the song received a lot of air time. My wife, a Jazzercise zealot in that era, found its beat and energy worthy of some of her work-outs. It’s also a song that became used in commercials, and on television shows and in movies. It doesn’t really stream to me when I’m walking around, though, because its energy isn’t a good fit for me.
Honestly, I know this song through my wife. When we drove together, she’d sometiimes switch the station on MY CAR’S RADIO to HER station. (If I become portrayed as childishly indignant and immature, that’s a good summary of myself about this action back then.) This song was often played on the station she listened to. It’s a different style than I preferred, but she loves it. It’s on her exercise workout CD and her iPod shuffle. Put it on and she starts singing and dancing, which I enjoy.
Here, from nineteen ninety-six, is Quad City DJs with ‘C’mon N’ Ride It’. I prefer not to think about what train they’re riding.
Today’s Monday! Something peppier is required, something with a beat, something to move me through the hours of sunshine, from the chilly morning into the warm afternoon.
Responding to the request, my mind streamed a few songs. I settled on this hit by the Romantics. From nineteen eighty, here is, ‘What I Like About You’.
Sublime was on the scene briefly. A ska-punk band, I had only one of their albums. One of their hits was ‘Santeria’, in nineteen ninety-seven.My first question was, what is Santeria? Fortunately, Sarah and Vinnie on Alice (KLLC) answered that question for me as I was driving to work and on errands in the SF Bay Area. Sarah and Vinnie were great company in the early morning. I drifted the dial for the rest of the day, a funny way to express pressing on buttons to find a new station.
I enjoyed living in the SF Bay Area. Lots to do, great places eat and shop, wonderful book stores, and lots of concerts. The weather was usually fabulous for about two thirds of the year. Work and traffic consumed most of our time, yet it was all good.
Of course, by the time I learned of Sublime, Bradley Nowell, the lead singer and guitarist, was already dead of a heroin overdose. What intrigued me about ‘Santeria’, besides that word, was the general tone of the lyrics against the easy-going melody. Here is this guy, upset that he’d lost his girlfriend, which he was calling a heina. He was calling the guy he’d lost her to, ‘sancho’, and wanted to shoot and kill sancho for revenge. None of it was forced and seemed authentic and true. Learning of Nowell’s death and the band’s success after Nowell’s death was another layer for reflection while waiting for a green light and listening to the song.
The Wayback Machine started streaming music from nineteen sixty-seven this morning. I don’t know what triggered that setting. Maybe it was that I read a VOX article ranking the best Rolling Stones songs yesterday, and several of the top ten seemed to be from the mid to late sixties.
At any rate, from the Stones came a Van Morrison connection. I enjoy his voice and style and found myself singing several of his songs, including ‘Brown Eyed Girl’. I’ve always enjoyed the simple melody and nostalgic, evocative lyrics. Much later in life, I discovered that the song’s lyrics were too suggestive for the radio. I learned it at the same time that I became educated on ‘Wake Up Little Susie’s’ shocking lyrics. I’ve also read, but haven’t been able to vet this, that Van Morrison didn’t think much of his hit.
His thoughts on his song doesn’t change my impressions of it. I hope you enjoy it, and that the lyrics don’t offend you too much.
Another anniversary was passed. This one was less remembered and noted than many anniversaries.
Today’s song is ‘Ohio’, by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSN&Y). The Kent State shootings inspired the song when Ohio National Guardsman shot at protesters, killing four, in nineteen seventy. Nine others were wounded. Some of those shot were watching the protest or walking the area, and not taking part in the protests.
I vividly remember hearing the song for the first time. It was a warm morning, but humid after thunderstorms the previous night, and our patch of suburbia was richly green. I was in my friend’s back yard in Penn Hills, PA. Curt lived up the street from me. He, John, Ricky and Bruce, all neighbors and classmates (except Bruce), were the core of my friendships. Curt’s back yard was slick with mud from the heavy rains. Mosquitoes were swarming, along with horse flies.
The Kent State protests were mostly about President Nixon’s Cambodia Campaign, just announced. It seems appropriate for our era, as we’re protesting an American Executive branch’s words, actions, behavior and stated intentions, to listen to this song and think about the words. Appallingly, I saw an FB post encouraging ‘vets’ to run over protesters. It sickened my heart to read such sentiments. Is that why vets went to war, to return and run over others exercising their rights and freedoms?
Some seem to have twisted ideas about how it all works.
Speaking as a vet and knowing many vets, I don’t believe most of them think protesters should be run over. Maybe I’m in a bubble, and I’m wrong. We used to say, I don’t agree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it. So, on the one hand, yes, the person can encourage vets to run over protesters, as it’s their right, but I find their sentiment sublimely hateful, ignorant, and depressing.
This song captured how appalled some of us were then. I remember being surprised that my friends were unaware of the Kent State shootings or what it was all about. Their parents were aware but guarded. Looking back, I grasp how conservative that housing plan where I lived was at the time.
Listen to the song, though, and the chorus, “Four dead in Ohio,” stays with you.
Still streaming nineteen seventies stuff, I turn to Kiss.
I was never a large Kiss fan, and I don’t have a logical reason for that. They just were not me. But, one song, was acceptable to me. That’s ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’. I guess that ‘nite’ annoys me and is emblematic of what annoys me about Kiss.
This song, though, contained the essence of what I wanted back in nineteen seventy-five, when this was a hit. I wanted to rock and roll all night, and party every day. Now I prefer to read and sleep all night, and write every day.
Keeping it simple and staying with classic rock from the nineteen seventies. Here is Bad Company with ‘Can’t Get Enough’. While I listened to it in the barracks during technical training, hurrying around the Triangle at Keesler AFB, or driving around my first assignment at Wright-Pat, it remains a great song for streaming through your head and walking around.
Nineteen seventy-four: I had my license and a car. The car was a nineteen sixty-five Mercury Comet sedan. Forest green and an automatic, its two eighty-nine V-8 hustled me around the hills of southern West Virginia.
I graduated high school. My wife, who was then my girlfriend, was a year behind me, and had gone to Europe for a month. I was working odd jobs at the oil and gas distribution center when the Air Force recruiter called me. What the hell, I decided, and enlisted.
It was a shock to my girlfriend. It was a shock to everyone.
It wasn’t the greatest decision, an impulse because I was impatient to get out of there, to be free, to be my own person, impatience that still haunts me.
There’s no doubt what song represents that year best: ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’, by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. I used to sing it to my girlfriend, to entertain her.
‘Smoke On the Water’ was a big hit for Deep Purple in 1973.
I was finishing my high school junior year when this air guitar-inspiring, head bopping power rock of the finest vintage. That it was based on a true story and had interesting references in the lyrics was an added bonus. Crank this song up and the walls would throb while the windows rattled. Peers, though, would share my grin. Guys loved it; girls tolerated it. We couldn’t hear anything else, but what the hell did it matter?
It was a good song for lighting up a doobie, which sometimes happened back then.
Michael Seidel, writer 