The lights are low and the music is loud. I’m with friends at one of their houses, in my late teens, in the military, essentially, an adult now tasting the spectrum of responsibility by doing whatever I wanted because I was now an adult, and adults can do whatever they want, aslongaswedon’thurtanyonebreakanylawsrulesorregulationsandshowupforworkontime.
I was a responsible rebel.
So this song, “Fox On the Run,” is playing. Someone asks, “Who is this?” I answer, “Sweet.” We shout to be heard.
He looks at me and says, “Sweet what?”
“Sweet,” I answer.
“Sweet what?” he asks.
Catching that he doesn’t understand as others laugh, I say, “The group is called Sweet.”
“Oh,” he says. “I thought you were saying sweet.”
“I was.” That fired a neuron onto a axon. From it, I proclaim, “We’re all always seeking the sweet spot.”
That gains laughter. “You’re crazy,” others agree.
“Probably,” I agree.
Here is “Fox on the Run,” from nineteen seventy-four. It’s by Sweet.
Today’s theme song comes from last night’s activities. We attended the Rock the Resistance last night, an Indivisible fund raiser for Oregon District Two. Local talent performed. We have terrific local talent, like the Rogue Suspects, LEFT, and Girls Just Want to Have Fun. One of the songs performed was “Higher Ground.”
Written and recorded by Stevie Wonder in nineteen seventy-three, when I was still getting my eyes opened in high school, it’s an uplifting song, perfect for a fund-raiser supporting the “Resist!” movement. While dancing, singing along, and sipping a beer, I thought of the rest of the world. War in Myanmar. Flooding in Asia. Evacuations for Hurricane Irma. Eyes on Hurricane Jose. Texas and Louisiana recovering from Hurricane Harvey. Mexico recovering from an earthquake. Wars on going on everywhere, driving people from their lands into a search for safety, and wild fires burning in Canada, America’s Pacific Northwest, and California. It’s a mess, ain’t it?
It ain’t new. All these things have always been going on. War, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes have always been with us.
One hundred years ago, in nineteen seventeen, learning about other’s catastrophe and trying to help them out would have taken some time. Now, updates come by the second via digital channels, satellites, and social media, and connect us to one another.
Watching disasters and wars on my monitors and televisions while sipping coffee at home demonstrates how fast technology has outraced our thinking, culture, and politics. We’re together but isolated. We don’t need to be. Dare I say that we need a significant paradigm shift?
Yes. Technology is going to keep racing by. And look how much of it is conceived and designed in one locale, manufactured in another location, and sold and used in other places. We need each other. Meanwhile, countries are starting to man the borders to shut others out. It’s backward behavior. Fear drives many of these actions. Hatred contributes, and ignorance amplifies and sustains this backward behavior.
We’re one world. We’re one tribe. We keep spiting others, and end up spiting ourselves. Come on, people, we need to get our shit together. Time to start trying, and keep on trying, until we reach a higher ground. That’s the paradigm shift needed: we need to stop thinking in terms of nations, and think in terms of people, without regard for anything except that we’re all people.
Today’s music comes because my wife and I mis-heard song lyrics. This is sometimes called an ononym, but is often called a mondegreen.
Jon Carroll used to write about mondegreens in his SF Chronicle column. (Maybe he still does. My subscription ended.) Along with his commentary about his cats, Archie and Bucket, I enjoyed these mondegreen columns. Although I didn’t know what a mondegreen was, I first encountered one with Jimi Hendrix. He was singing, “Excuse me, while I kiss the sky.” I heard him telling me he was going to kiss a guy. Like most mondegreens, I wasn’t alone in my mis-hearing.
That’s the same today. There’s a Calvin Harris song out called “Feels.” The song features Pharrell Williams, Katy Perry, and Big Sean. It was the Katy Perry part that confused us. We were certain Katy was singing, “Don’t be afraid to catch fish.”
Being semi-rational sentient individuals, my other and I wondered, what the hell? Why is she singing about fish? Is this a reference to there being many fish in the sea? Perhaps fish was another euphemism for dating or sex.
What? Really?
Reaching home, I employed a minute to search for the truth. First, I wasn’t alone; lots of us thought Katy Perry was singing about fish. Most of us are older.
Well, honestly, ‘catch feels’ made little more sense than catching fish, but at least we knew the truth. Listen for yourself, then tell me that it doesn’t sound like fish.
Jimi Hendrix took me like he’d done so many others. I heard his music and thought, “Whoa. Who is that?”
Hendrix died when I was in my freshman year at high school. School had just begun a few weeks before. Attending John H. Linton Intermediate school, I was smitten with Melissa Smith. Melissa sat behind me in science. I was shy, so Melissa took it upon her to talk to me. Her opening gambit was about music. First we talked about “Tommy” and other Who songs. Then Hendrix died, so we talked about his music and death. Funny, but in my memory, Melissa was my opposite. She dressed in a preppie style, skirts, blouses and sweaters, while my attire skated along the spectrum toward unkempt hippie. My hair was a wild and curly mess while she sported something from “That Girl.” Nevertheless, we liked each other.
Years after Hendrix’s passing, I learned about his influence on the British musicians, like Clapton, Lennon, Jagger, Jones, and Townsend. Their interest and impressions of him provided me with a vicarious bond to the times. Almost fifty hears later, “Fire” energizes me in a way few other songs ever do.
Sometimes I think that I need to just get away from it all. Stick me in a stasis chamber and call me when it’s over. If not that, let me just fly away. Sing it for me, Lenny. From nineteen ninety-eight.
How about a little Sam Cooke,delivered live by Van Morrison with Jeff Beck’s help, to move your day along? Recorded live this year, here is “Bring It On Home to Me.”
h/t to Rolling Stone Magazine for delivering this to my ebox today.
Here we go. Reference to what is a classic in your personal realm of taste is different from others. Age, era, and where and when you grew up all count into it, right? Other factor play into it. The net, what’s classic in my personal universe is foreign to you, and the reverse applies.
But this is a classic for me. It often streams into my head in conjunction with my muse. Muse might be properly plural here. I have multiple voices in my head. They all might belong to one muse, who likes doing other voices, or an army of muses. I don’t know. I sometimes wonder, when you die, what happens to the voices in your head, like your muses? I believe they go find someone else to reside in.
Here is my classic, a song for my muse. Several have covered it, but the classic for me is Santana, in nineteen seventy. I remember listening it on my little AM/FM clock radio, “with stereo.” Then I had it on vinyl, open reel, cassette tape, and CD.
Do you have daily theme music, or music that highlights an activity?
My daily theme music is often a reflection of a momentary lapse of reason, or a thought in the nick of time. Themes vary through the day, though, mirroring moods and events. Sometimes I find myself with the themes from the television series “Mission Impossible” or “Sanford and Son” in my head.
The smoke levels dropped today. The A.Q.I. remains listed as unhealthy, but it seems much clearer and more comfortable. The air temp was a comfortable seventy-six F under partly cloudy skies. That allowed me to walk in comfort.
I wrote in my head as I walked around town (actually designing the Epitomy, the starship serving as base in “Black Dust”). Bonnie Tyler’s song, “Holding Out For A Hero,” accompanied my thoughts. The song was in a movie you might have seen, “Footloose,” in nineteen eighty-four, but it’s been used for multiple campaigns. Bonnie puts a lot into singing the song, which was written by the talented Dean Pritchford.
I could use a hero this year, not just in my novels, but in life. Maybe I just place an ad: “Wanted: principled individual to save the world.”
Like later, in “Where’s the beef,” I missed out on what was going on with this song, because I was living elsewhere in the world. Contact with American pop culture was intermittent in those days.
I really first heard of it was when I visited Mom after returning to America. My younger sisters lived with her. They loved this song, “My Sharona.” I’d heard little of it, or the Knack. When I mentioned that to them, they replied, “I’m getting a little sick of it. It’s being played all the time.”
This was nineteen seventy-nine, the middle of the disco reign. “My Sharona” was nothing like disco of the time. It reminded me of the early Brit invasion stuff, like “Bang the Gong,” in structure, but with less textures.
The song never really caught fire with me. I was immune to its spell. But – there’s always a but, isn’t there? “Welcome to Heaven.” “I’m made it to Heaven?” “Yes, but, it’s not what you think.” Or, “I love you, but — ”
Yeah. Fear the “but.”
But, I awoke with a variation of “My Sharona” in my head. Here’s Weird Al Yankovic with his parody song, “My Bologna.” It was all in nineteen seventy-nine, when nobody needed to remind the POTUS not to look at the sun without proper eye-protection.
Today, Monday, August twenty-first, is the great eclipse day. People in Oregon, where I reside, are almost all beside themselves with anticipation. Today’s theme music is naturally related to the eclipse.
Numerous songs about the eclipse exist. I was drawn to “Eclipse,” by Pink Floyd, from their “Dark Side of the Moon” album. It’s a life-long favorite album, well, since I was seventeen, when it came out. The final words speak to me:
All that you touch
All that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
All that you love
All that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
All that you give
All that you deal
All that you buy
Beg, borrow or steal
All you create
All you destroy
All that you do
All that you say
All that you eat
And everyone you meet
All that you slight
And everyone you fight
All that is now
All that is gone
All that’s to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon
It’s a beautiful way of expressing that everything is connected while capturing the irony, everything is in tune, but the moon is eclipsing the sun, so…what has happened?
But then, awakening and looking out into the backyard, where sunshine first appears, I thought, here comes the sun, and wondered how many people at different times of this day have stood, watching the sky, and will say or think, “Here comes the sun.” With those thoughts, it became my choice for today’s music.
“Here Comes the Sun,” the Beatles, nineteen sixty-nine. It’s really appropriate for post-eclipse singing.
Michael Seidel, writer 