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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Michael Seidel, writer 