I enjoyed Bowie and his music, and lament his passing. Fortunately, technology and memories serve well to keep the music playing.
Today found my mind shuffling and streaming old Bowie songs like “Diamond Dogs,” “Suffragette City,” and today’s offering, “Rebel, Rebel.” No particular reason for singing it today, except I like the song for its laid-back approach and the amused, disdainful sense of observation and discovery heard in the lyrics.
You’ve got your mother in a whirl
She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl
Hey babe, your hair’s alright
Hey babe, let’s go out tonight
You like me, and I like it all
We like dancing and we look divine
You love bands when they’re playing hard
You want more and you want it fast
They put you down, they say I’m wrong
You tacky thing, you put them on
I became seventeen that year. I’d moved in with my father the year before, 1972. He retired from the Air Force, and we moved to West Virginia. We bought a place, and it burned down. Just about all the few possessions I had when I quit living with Mom were gone. We didn’t have insurance. The paperwork and payment were on the dining room table, and burned.
I was hoping for better with 1973. It went great for a while, but then I cut off the end of my big toe while cutting the grass with a gas-powered lawn mower. That took me out of sports and doing many things. Frequently a loner, I retreated into art, music, and reading, which were always my natural sanctuaries.
Fortunately, ’73 was a good year for music. This song, “Drift Away” performed and released by Dobie Gray, summed up the year for me.
Beginnin’ to think that I’m wastin’ time
I don’t understand the things I do
The world outside looks so unkind
Now I’m countin’ on you to carry me through
Oh, give me the beat boys and free my soul
I wanna get lost in your rock ‘n’ roll and drift away
Yeah, give me the beat boys and free my soul
I wanna get lost in your rock ‘n’ roll and drift away
And when my mind is free
You know a melody can move me
And when I’m feelin’ blue
The guitar’s comin’ through to soothe me
Don’t know about you, but Gospel music often talks to me. Aided by a dream, this song streamed into my consciousness from the year 1972. “I’ll Take You There” was a great song for the time because its slow beat allowed a close, swaying slow-dance with a girl, something that I sought when I was a sixteen year old boy. It’s like a feel-good song of hope, not for love alone, but for progress and civil rights.
This John Lennon song, “Whatever Get You Through the Night,” is energetic and peppy, and struck me as much different from his other offerings. I like the extensive, enthusiastic sax in it, which, with the piano, makes the song feel like it’s from a different era, and the twist on the lyrics that becomes “Whatever gets your through your life.” That’s how a lot of us live, somewhere between dreaming and striving, grabbing and holding on to what comes our way.
This is a long time favorite. I hope I’ve not shared it before. If I have, suffer.
Let’s listen to CCR, sometimes more formally known as Creedence Clearwater Revival, and their song, “Bad Moon Rising,” from 1969. I like this, too, for the mondegreen, where, “There’s a bad moon on the rise,” is sometimes heard as “There’s a bath room on the right.” I’ve been known to propagate the misheard lyric and assure people those are the corrects words.
I was in the military for twenty plus years before moving into the corporate business world. After leaving the military, I worked at startups on the SF Bay area peninsula. Corporations swallowed the startups, and I ended up with IBM, where I stayed for fifteen years.
I preferred the military over the corporate world most of the time. Corporations paid better and demanded less work of me. The pay is a benefit, but the less work meant the jobs were less satisfying and less spiritually, emotionally, and mentally rewarding. Our sense of time in the military was much different. Now meant NOW in the military. For civilians, now was a blob of indeterminate time that can stretch from a day to a year.
Other differences were noted. Corporate employees had less sense of unity. Morale seemed worse. There was a greater sense of malaise, of “Here we go again.” Civilians had far less accountability, too. In the military, screw up, and the laser beam of ownership and explanation found you fast.
I liked the ownership and accountability, because they also quickly recognized you. The other good deal to me when I was in the military were assignment rotations. Every two to four years (it varied by rank and assignment), I moved to somewhere else. While on assignment, I could change duties and responsibilities, and even units. That kept things fresher and more interesting. Keeping it all coherent was a strong understanding of the mission. The mission didn’t change.
It wasn’t so in the civilian world, except when I left companies and joined another. My job at IBM changed three times, but I had many, many bosses in those years. IBM did a lot of restructuring and re-organizations. They started many projects (and most of them faded away). They had great ideas but poor execution. New products were often exciting, but the finished product rarely seemed to fulfill the initial promises.
That was my life with the corporation. Your results may vary, but I found that with U.S. Surgical, Tyco, and ISS, as well.
Anyway, wherever I was, I often thought of this song as I left one job and went to another. Here’s “Take This Job and Shove It,” by David Alan Coe, performed and released by Johnny Paycheck in 1977.
I started thinking about this song on the fifteenth. The fifteenth used to be my pay day, back in the days when the man employed me.
It’s always fascinating how pay day affects the area’s dynamics. Being close to poor when I was a married airmen in the Air Force, I understood. Every penny was saved and accounted for in the budget. Saving enough to pay for a treat, like Ho-hos, was a big deal. Ho-hos were ninety-nine cents back then.
But we knew we were more fortunate than others. We lived paycheck to paycheck, but we were saving, and slowly pulled ahead. We had food, electricity, clean water, shelter, and security. We had each other, a cat, and a car.
So, in honor of who I was, and the others who work and struggle, here is ZZ Top’s “Just Got Paid,” from 1972.
In this throwback stream, I visit with the Blues Travelers. I haven’t heard a lot of their music outside of air play, and this is the song I know best. It’s a light ditty with some pleasant harmonica play.
I feel fortunate to be listening to this song. When I read of Dolores Riordan’s death, I reflected on the group and their music, and her. My favorite Cranberry offering is “Zombie,” but “Linger” lingered with me throughout the day until “Run Around” dislodged it. I credit the song’s opening line for that feat: “Once upon a midnight dreary, I woke with something in my head.” I’d been writing in my head, as I often do, splash writing, when something splashes out of containment and into my consciousness.
I was reading the news today (oh, boy), and parts of this song came back to me. After trying and failing to remember more of it as I walked, I finally sat down and googled some remembered lyrics.
Success!
In honor of the POTUS and his administration, here is TMBG with “Doctor Evil,” from “Austin Powers.”
Michael Seidel, writer 