Category: memories

Today’s Theme Music

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.

I guess we do change.

Here’s the live version. I do like its energy.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

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.

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Today’s Theme Music

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.

Yes, we were in love.

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Today’s Theme Music

‘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.

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Today’s Theme Music

I’m still streaming from my childhood years in the Pittsburgh area today. This one came out while I live in Penn Hills. Those days were filled with school and snow activities in the winter, and sports and friends just about every day. When the sun heated the days into the eighties and nineties in the summer, Penn Hills was a gorgeous backdrop to growing up. Baseball was our big thing. With Maz, Steve Blass, Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, Manny Sanguillen, Richie Hebner, Al Oliver, Manny Alou, and big Dave Parker, the Pirates under Danny Murtaugh had become a force. The Steelers’ emergence remained a few years away.

The era’s music seemed customized for our lives. This song, ‘Psychedelic Shack’, by the Temptations, is from nineteen seventy. The lyrics are easy to learn and the beat carries me like a wave.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s selection is streaming from nineteen seventy-one.

A year of personal change, this was the year I moved in with Dad. He’d just returned from Germany and was assigned to DESC in the Dayton, Ohio, area. We lived in Page Manor housing.

I was fifteen. It was the year I met my wife, although that didn’t become known to me for a few years. This song, ‘Signs’, by the Five Man Electrical Band, suited my milieu. Tesla later did a decent cover, but my stream is sentimental today, so I hung with the original.

I was a long-haired freaky person, so the words speak to me: “Signs, signs, everywhere signs. Blocking our scenery, breaking my mind. Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the signs?” I was rebelling against signs and the conformance they urged and demands they made. Signs still inundate our lives, and if there’s not a sign, there’s probably an app.

Here it is, ‘Signs’.

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Today’s Theme Music

This song was in my head when I awoke.

I first learned of Stevie Ray Vaughn rather late. A literature professor introduced me to SRV’s work. Stationed at Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan, in nineteen eighty-three, I was taking classes with the University of Maryland, and my wife and I became friends with the professor. He had several PhDs, acquired during his career as a professional student seeking to be a rock star by playing guitar with a local band.

He was incredulous that I didn’t know who SRV was and insisted on giving me a cassette tape of ‘Texas Flood’. I was hooked. Here is ‘Pride and Joy’, a good way to start a morning. Time for some pancakes.

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Today’s Theme Music

Back at it. Things usually don’t work out as expected or desired for me. I plan for a reasonable knock-off of the best and forge forward. Yeah.

I have this thing going on, this writing thing. Besides the arc of learning, there are the arcs of success, not just with a career, but with each novel, every effort and each writing day. Some days, I want to chuck it. Those days are infrequent and come about when I’m hunting for something I think is missing. I’ll not give up. In the immortal lyrics of Judas Priest, “You think I’ll let it go, you’re mad, you got another thing comin’.”

Here they are, singing all about it back in nineteen eighty-two. Hope it helps you crystallize your determination.

Now, nose down, time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

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Today’s Theme Music

Visiting with Mom, my brain stream naturally turns toward the music I heard then. One of my favorites of nineteen seventy-one was ‘Brown Sugar’ by the Rolling Stones. I was fifteen then and thought, “This is rock and roll.”

Hope you have a good Sunday. Hope you enjoy the song.

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Today’s Theme Music

“Let’s dance. Put on your red shoes and dance the blues.”

Yeah, I’m hearing it like it’s nineteen eighty-three. Good year for me. Exciting future ahead. Woo-hoo. The future was so bright, I had to wear shades. I never knew then that I’d be worrying about the sun going down on me. Never thought about walking the line, dancing in the dark, or learning to fly. Yet, here I am sixty going on a million, flapping my arms and trying to catch the wind beneath my wings.

It’s all a pot of words, a stew of ideas, a stream of visions and information, a stick, a stone, the end of the road.

Here’s some Saturday morning Bowie. He always knew more than us.

 

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