Category: memories

Today’s Theme Music

I’m visiting ‘home’.

The area was home to me for three years, culminating in my high school graduation and subsequent military enlistment. That was childhood’s end. But this is where my wife’s mother resides, so here we are.

Its patchwork roads connect patchwork towns. Old schools have been re-purposed as hopeful enterprises but they already look enervated. As I drive around, noting changes and the lack of change, I’m reminded of cancer. So much of the area strikes me as blighted. Fast food businesses and gas stations dominate with their neon, plastic and bright colors, as the businesses of the last century lay barren beside them, empty and crumbling. It’s sad art, expressing the truth of the area, and America in general.

Remembering ex-classmates, I peer at each face about my age and wonder if I know them. I doubt few of them planned to live a patchwork life, and mock myself for thinking, that because I moved away, I’m living more than a patchwork life.

Out of that cesspool of reflection comes some Green Day. From 2004, ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’. 

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Today’s Theme Music

I’ve returned to a place where I once lived. Reconciliation becomes a an algebra problem. There are so many unknowns. Solve for X.

The undertones remain the same. Nothing changed in those frequencies.

A song begins because I’m a nostalgic romantic.

Glenn Frey wrote and recorded it. I learned it in 1985.

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Today’s Theme Music

Ah, today, we have a classic. Ray Davis took his music seriously. I’ve done one of the Kinks’ songs before, but it’s time to bring on ‘Lola’. I vividly remember talking about this song with my sister and my neighbor, John. Sis was two years older. It was a warm summer day in 1970, and we were in our backyard in Penn Hills, PA.

I later saw the Kinks in concert in Germany. We were in a pink marbled concert hall. It was so damn elegant, it was amazing, washing the Kinks concert experience with a surreal veneer.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s song is right out of the American pop-rock scene of the nineteen seventies. It’s by a Canadian group who had a handful of hits and multiple excellent albums.

That’s the Guess Who. Love those rock band names. Today’s song is ‘American Woman’. People have argued about the lyric’s intentions since it came out. I once read one of the song-writers quoting John Lennon to the effect that a song’s meanings emerge after they’re recorded and that someone else needs to interpret them. I was writing a paper comparing the writing styles of Kurt Vonnegut and Mario Puzo at the time. I’d read some comments by them about how readers find meanings that the writers never intended. That doesn’t make those meanings wrong or illegitimate.

I was beginning to see and understand that in literature, art and music. People find their own meanings. It’s always fascinating then to hear people argue about these things as though they’re absolutes, and not shaped by own lives and dreams.

And it reminds me of eating food. People are always insisting to others, “Try this, it’s great, you’ll love it!” But tastes buds are also tastes, aren’t they? Sure. Try convincing others of that. They take your disagreement as a personal insult.

That’s what many Americans did with ‘American Woman’. They disagreed with what they saw as the song’s meaning and rejected it. I’ve had people tell me that they hate this song, because it was about hating America to them.

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Today’s Theme Song

I was a racing fanatic when I was young. I followed NASCAR, Formula 1, Indy, Can-Am, Trans-Am, SCCA amateur racing, and sports cars racing, such as LeMans.

Nineteen seventy-three was a disaster for the Indy 500. Rain delayed the race. Several fatalities happened in practice and in the race. Among them, Swede Savage was killed. ABC Sports was showing the race. They put a montage of images together about the race and used James Taylor’s song, ‘Fire and Rain’, as the soundtrack. Gordon Johncock, in a Patrick Racing Eagle-Offy, was eventually declared the winner.

At the same time, I’d moved out from Mom’s house, and in with Dad. He’d been in the USAF. We lived in Ohio, at Wright-Pat, but he retired, and he and I moved south, to West Virginia. We lived with someone else for a bit until we got a place. It burned down within a month of moving in. All our possessions were gone. Among the items burned was the check to the insurance company. Nothing was insured. It wasn’t a good start.

I’d had a crush on a girl, Susie, and she liked me, but moving away ended all of that. The song ‘Fire and Rain’ had a line, “Susanne, the plans they made put an end to you.” I took that personally when I heard that song during that tragic race. I knew Susie and I had changed. Never very socially engaged, in a new school with a curriculum that was a few years behind what I knew, I became more withdrawn.

I knew the song from its nineteen seventy release. That’s when Susie and I started hanging out together sometimes. Its connection to the tragic and disastrous nineteen seventy-three Indy 500 and my life changes shifted the way I think about that era, and that song. Yet, the song is a comfort. Although I emerged more withdrawn, I think I emerged more thoughtful, mature and independent. But, now, from the vantage that times’ passing can give, I see, too, that I became more emotionally detached, and I remain like that.

This is not what I thought I’d share today. I guess it just comes from where I’m at in the moment.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

This song was originally performed by a small, little known group called the Beatles. The song itself was written by an obscure songwriter named Paul McCartney. I think he may have written one or two other songs that also charted as a hit somewhere. None come to mind.

I preferred the cover of this song by a guy name Joe Cocker. Not many people are familiar with his work but he had a minor hit with his cover of this song, ‘She Came in Through the Bathroom Window’, in nineteen seventy. I find it a soothing song to stream while tramping about. Cheers

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Today’s Theme Music

I was listening to Uriah Heep for years. My wife didn’t know anything about them but began listening to my albums extensively while I was on a fifteen-month unaccompanied tour to the Philippines a year into our marriage.

Like a lot of albums from that era, I played the whole album extensively. That’s how it was done in my youth. We had one segment, it seemed, who liked to load and listen to forty-fives. I was of another school. We put on one side of the thirty-three LP, listened to it, turned it over and listened to the other side. As my memory functions, that means that I will often automatically recall and begin streaming the next song from the album in my head.

Now, of course, with downloads, it’s way different.

Originally part of their ‘Demons and Wizards’ album, Easy Livin” was a song released by Uriah Heep in 1972. It became their only U.S. hit, and only reached something like the high twenties on the top forty playlists. I don’t think I ever hear it, or anything else from Uriah Heep, played on the radio. But this one, with its hard pressing guitar, fast pace, quick bass and spread of organ has taken a place in my heart.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s song is another hit from Wayback because I’m thinking about progress. This one, ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair’), was written by John Phillips but released by Scott McKenzie in 1967.

The song attracts me today because I heard it on the radio this morning. Some of the lines include, “All across the nation, such a strange vibration, people in motion. There’s a whole generation, with a new explanation. People in motion.”

Yes, I thought. That’s one of the things about the last Presidential election in the United States. Donald Trump preached a movement back. He appealed to people stuck in time. They weren’t in motion and weren’t moving forward. If they were moving, they were going backward to when men had more rights and white men had the most rights and privilege of anyone, and the wealthy were on pedestals as capable people. While these voters and supporters wouldn’t say they’re against these things, the man they selected is against regulations that protect people, animals, the environment, and the poor, sick and needy. Tearing down the public school system through Betsy DeVos isn’t a move forward, as that billionaire who never attended a public school will try to do. He’s gutting every system save defense while he promises new jobs and to rebuild the infrastructure. Yet, he also is going to cut taxes, reduces revenue, so there will be no money to pay for that infrastructure. He preyed on them with fear and promised he will build a wall to protect them. The Trump Wall will be beautiful, he claims, a big beautiful wall.

Many of those voters are in impoverished areas where industry has disappeared or pay minimum wages. The areas are dominated by elderly people, and the disability rates for these area are higher than the national average and increasing at a faster rate. These are the very people that the social net Trump is tearing about helps the most. Trump said he was draining the swamp and that he would change business as usual. His attack on Syria and his selection of wealthy cronies and family members to staff his White House show very much that it’s still a swamp. He criticized Obama for golfing too much while he golfs almost every weekend.

He is not the path forward. I’m going on without him and his supporters. Yes, the song may be fifty years old, but the sentiment that there are people moving forward and causing change is older yet. Yet, for some, it’s all new, strange and dangerous.

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Today’s Theme Music

We’re streaming some Blues Traveler out of the Wayback Machine today.

The day has a retro feel to it. It feels like 1995 all over again. That wasn’t bad for me, nor great. Likewise, for the rest of the world. The US ‘had swung to the left’ again, and Bill Clinton was POTUS. He wasn’t left, but a master of the center. The voting population still remained left of him on our political spectrum. Still does today.

Back in 1995, I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do. I’d just retired, so I had my military pension. My wife was working for an ad agency but income from those two stories didn’t carry far in the Bay area. It wasn’t as bad as it is now, but the rising house and land prices were harbingers of what was to come.

Anyway, to the music.  The Blues Travelers had been around for a while but were making it onto the pop charts with ‘Run-Around’ in 1995. John Popper’s harmonica was unusual for pop music of that era. It’s a good song for putting your left foot in front of your right a few thousand times and perambulating down streets, sidewalks and trails. Singing it while walking about provides a fine feeling of freedom.

Sing it with them.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s offering comes from my early teen-age years. My older sister was a Grand Funk Railroad fan, so I became one. I loved their live album, especially the ‘Into the Sun’ track.  They were the first rock group I really paid attention to, leading me to Alice Cooper, Humble Pie, Uriah Heep, Pink Floyd, Cream, Santana, Black Sabbath, and so on….

But today’s song is Grand Funk’s mainstream hit from 1973, ‘We’re An American Band’. It was so much different from their earlier work, to me, a sell out, IMO, back in the day. I was in high school and lived alone with my father during this period, waking myself up, going to school, cleaning house, preparing my meals for myself, washing my clothes. I didn’t see much of him.

I awoke with it ringing in my head, so here it is for you.

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