Category: memories

Today’s Theme Music

I’m doing more streaming out of the Wayback Machine. This morning, we jump back to the year of my high school graduation, 1974.

Ah, exciting times. Vietnam. Nixon. Whip Inflation Now. Watergate. Cold War. ‘The Godfather’. ‘The Exorcist’. Eight track and cassette tapes. Princess phones, wall phones and extra-long telephone cords were in vogue.

Cable television viewership was rising. Microwaves were riding in on the first wave of availability. Companies were messing around with smaller computers but they were still focused on business. VCRs, DVDs, and Compact Discs were all in the future, as were Microsoft and Apple. There were still two Germanys. No European Union. Cell phones were just being used for the first calls but they were huge, expensive, heavy clunkers.

We were still recovering from the oil crisis of 1973. The national fifty-five miles per hour speed limit was upon us. The Phantom F-4 was our front line fighter, along with the F-111. The F-16 was still a prototype, and the F-14 was just entering service, with the F-15 coming along behind it. The Expos still played in Montreal, the Nationals didn’t play in Washington, and the Rockies and Marlins were still dreams.

From that stew, we have the Troggs with ‘Wild Thing’. I loved the song’s use in the film, ‘Major League’, in 1989. Charlie Sheen played Ricky ‘Wild Thing’ Vaughn, a Cleveland Indians pitcher. Of course, the Troggs hit was a cover of a song written, recorded and released in 1965 and the song in the movie was a cover by X.

So, here we go, a 1965 song, 1974 hit, from a 1989 movie, in which it was covered by a punk band, enjoyed in 2017.

Isn’t technology grand?

 

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Today’s Theme Music

Feel like something energetic today. Maybe it’s the sun. It’s actually visible when we get up, and there’s sunshine until almost seven thirty in the evening.

Hooray for sunshine.

It’s warmer, too. Got up to the low sixties yesterday. Winter is drawing out his departure but each day leaves us with less evidence that he was here.

All of this calls for something older, something with a little guitar action. From out of the streams of thinking came one from 1976, during my tour of duty in the Philippines.

Here is Thin Lizzy with ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’. 

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Today’s Theme Music

The end of the last century went well for me. Retiring from the military, I was living in the Bay area and was able to catch fire a start-up. I worked with diligent, capable people. We had fun and the future was exciting. U.S. Surgical and then Tyco bought us, and everything changed. We made money but it was a lot less fun.

Into this came a group with an unusual sound called ‘Smash Mouth’. They eventually had a few more hits and became well known for providing the theme music to ‘The Big Bang Theory’ on CBS, and for songs in the ‘Shrek’ franchise. Back in 1997, though, we knew them for ‘Walking on the Sun,’ with its cynical reflections on the hippie revolution, pop culture, advertising, and our future state of affairs.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s theme music is based on a song that came out in 2015. A deeply provocative and thoughtful song, it received a lot of air play and was said to profoundly affect millions of people around the world.

‘Uma Thurman’, by Fall Out Boys, states the secret dreams and desires many of us had when we watched John Travolta and Uma Thurman dancing in Q. Tarentino’s 1994 hit film, ‘Pulp Fiction’. 

 

It also features a riff out of ‘The Munsters’, altogether creating an unusually memorable turn in the song. When it came out on the radio, you’d be driving along, listening, and then suddenly hear that and think, “WTF?” The song ends up then addressing not only life in 2015 America, but part of our culture from 1994 and 1964.

‘The Munsters’, starring Fred Gwynn and Yvonne De Carlo as the father and mother of a family of monsters living at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, is classic 1960s American television. Here’s the theme music, in case you can’t place it.

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Today’s Theme Music

Blasted through another night of dreams. I traveled the world, saw confusion and met it with more confusion. A little clarity came with reflection after I was awake for a while.

Sometimes, you know, you wonder how people get away with what they do. You wonder, where the hell is the justice? What trick of fate lead some through lives of dissatisfaction and loss as others thrive no matter who and what they destroy in the process? We wish for instant karma or some kind of reckoning. We want to know what happens to them. Why do you follow all the rules only to end up bitter and sad as others break the rules and end up wealthy and happy?

I wonder but there aren’t answers. What’s the point of wondering, right? Sure, the unexamined life is much easier to live.

Let’s just rock the days away. Here’s ‘Best of You’ with Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters, from 2005. It was a song I heard quite a bit that year. Back then, my team was still in the SF Bay area. They were working from home from Santa Rosa, Walnut Creek, San Mateo, Pacifica, San Jose…all over. Once a month, I’d drive down from Ashland in Oregon and meet with them for planning and team building. We’d have lunch, discuss trends and problems, and just chat. The drive wasn’t difficult until I edged into the Bay area traffic around Fairfield. After that, it was hellacious.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s theme music streams in from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the massacre in Tienanmen Square.

The Berlin Wall wall was first a fence and then a guarded concrete wall. Built in 1961, it made East Berlin an island of Soviet Union totalitarianism and communism amidst western culture, democracy and freedom. I traveled through East Berlin by train while the wall was up. Still scarred by the tanks and guns of World War II, the streets were ghostly empty avenues behind crumbling concrete and rusting steel.

The massacre in Tienanmen Square is sometimes called the June Fourth Incident. The People’s Republic of China was experiencing a spring of democratic thought in 1989, with its people hoping for greater freedoms and independence. They dissented with their government’s position and were killed by their government for their ideals.

Now, in 2017, the Berlin Wall has fallen. The Union of Soviet Socialists States has fragmented into smaller nations, dominated by Russia. The PRC, often just called China, remains. While shifts have occurred there, it remains a nation of oppressed people with little freedoms.

Here in America, a billionaire has been elected POTUS with less than the popular vote. He wants to build a wall to protect us. As a child and adult who lived with a wall as a symbol of political differences and repression, I’m dubious of his motives and ideals, and leery of what might come to pass.

The events of Tienanmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall inspired Seal to write this song. Let’s hope this song inspires us and we avoid becoming the people behind the wall.

Here, from 1991, is Seal with ‘Crazy’. We’re never going to survive unless we get a little crazy.

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Today’s Theme Music

Testing, testing.

Can you hear me?

Excellent. Let’s get started.

Today’s theme music is by Fine Young Cannibals. This is ‘Good Thing’, from 1989. I think you’ll be pleased with the selection. It’s a fine song for streaming in your head as you conduct your business today.

Have a nice day.

That is all.

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Today’s Theme Music

Ah, Sunday morning.

An overcast sky hides sunshine. Temperatures in the upper forties keeps the light rain from becoming something more, and daffodils and blossoms on trees are powering serious Spring imagery. The coffee is brewed…soon pancakes will be prepared. Something light is required for such a serene sense of home and harmony.

Naw. Fed by dreams of insistence and resistance, the soul is hungering for something with a meaty beat. Enter Metallica. ‘Enter Sandman’. Enter 1991.

This song was released a few months after my arrival back to the United States. Living in the super-expensive SF Bay area, we were signed up for base housing. Meanwhile, we lived in a large one bedroom apartment on Mathilda Avenue in Sunnyvale, less than two miles from Onizuka Air Station, where I worked.

That area of Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Los Altos enjoyed gorgeous weather nine months of the year. By May, the standard forecast called for sunshine, blue skies, and a temperature of seventy by ten AM. We enjoyed our Sunday mornings with the SF Chronicle and a light repast. Frozen unbaked croissants were purchased at the Milk Pail Market at the corner of California and San Antonio in Alta View. We defrosted them and let them rise overnight, baking them early in the morning. Add some fresh fruit from De Martini Orchard in Los Altos, a cup of Peet’s coffee, and three sweet cats to supervise the meal, and it’s the ingredients of wonderful Sunday mornings and pleasant memories.

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Today’s Theme Music

I’m sorry for today’s selection. I apologize. I don’t know where my head is. My focus is scattered. I’m left with fractal thoughts that don’t seem to begin or end anywhere.

This may be a repeat of an earlier post. I don’t know. Sorry if it is.

What else should I write? What else should I be?

Never mind. I’m just babbling on. Sorry.

Here’s the song. From 1991, Nirvana, with ‘All Apologies’. 

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Today’s Theme Music

Awoke from my multiple dreams with my cerebral shuffle stuck on this song. I read on the intertubes that if you write it down and share it with others, and then get up and turn in a circle, spitting at the north each time, and then stop and close your eyes and say, “Song, quit me, song, quit me, song, quit me,” the song will magically stop playing in your head.

This might be a re-run. Apologies if it is, but it’s stuck in my head, and I need to rid myself of it. “Out, damn song, out.”

Here’s Foghat’s recording of ‘Fool for the City’ from 1975.

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