Category: pop culture

Tuesday’s Theme Music

Once again, I’m streaming music in via the Wayback Machine. This time, the rotary dial has spun around and landed on an Allman Brothers Band offering.

I spent hours listening to the ABA when I was in my teens, first on thirty-three R.P.M. vinyl, and then on cassette and open reels. I’d get prone on the shag-rug carpeting, lights off and the volume up, and let the music pummel me. I’d moved through those mediums seeking faithful fidelity, free of wow and flutter, and buzz and hum. Yes, I was insane.

“Ramblin Man,” written by band-member Dickey Betts, came out in seventy-three, when I was entering my senior year at high school. The song is off the album, “Brothers and Sisters.” A popular song, it’s probably one of ABA’s best known releases.

I offer it for your Tuesday pleasure, but it’s acceptable to enjoy it on other days.

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Today’s Theme Music

We saw George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers in concert last night, so I thought I’d play him today. Fabulous concert. He’s a helluva showman and an entertainer. The concert began with Barry McGuire’s recording of “Eve of Destruction” with the stage dark except for some blue lights. It ended with the star-spangled banner. Of course, all of their hits were played.

I didn’t know of Thorogood and the Destroyers (Delaware was later dropped) until the mid seventies, when he broke out and started garnering national attention. “Bad to the Bone” is hugely known and popular, and the band’s covers of old blues tunes became popular. I love their coverage of “Who Do You Love,” and that’s what I’m going with.

 

 

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Today’s Theme Music

One of our personal favorites, Dirty Cello didn’t make it to the OSF Green Show this year. Dirty Cello is Rebecca Roudman. She is now a they, as her husband accompanies her on guitar. As we didn’t see her live this year, I sought a Dirty Cello fix on line.

I posted about her in twenty sixteen with a video of her performing “Rock You Like A Hurricane.” I went with her rendition of Guns N Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine” for today.

Enjoy.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

An old fave. From an excellent album and nineteen eighty-five, here’s Annie Lennox and the Eurythmics with, “Would I Lie to You?”

I’d come back from Okinawa the year this was released, and was assigned to a mobility unit. We traveled a lot, mostly to Florida, but also Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, and Europe. I’d bought a new Mazda RX-7, and put over fifty thousand miles on it driving to temporary duty locations. The net result of that traveling, I’ve never seen this video until today. It’s, ah, interesting, with the story it told.

Side note: nineteen eighty-five was the year of my first computer. It used CP/M 86, had a tiny green screen, dual floppies, and ran at 4.77 MHz, but it was something. Using WordStar, I’d put it to learn how to write fiction, but mostly, I gamed on it.

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Today’s Theme Song

Here’s a song everyone can get behind. No matter if you’re for or against something, you can sing right along.

Here’s Twisted Sister with “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” ironically, perhaps only to me, from nineteen eighty-four. Video is a bit cheesy. Just sayin’.

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Modern Irritation #19

One of my biggest irritations this year – besides drivers who don’t utilize turn signals, of course, and people who reach the cash register totally unprepared to pay (as though they’d never had to pay before!), lying politicians, and slow Internet connections – are captions on television shows and movies that do not match what’s actually being said. Some seem to go through a lag of several seconds, as though censors must review the captions before they can be put up. A few memorable times, the captions weren’t even for the episode being watched.

Have you had any of this happen to you? We happen to watch a lot of foreign shows, where we’re not familiar with the language, languages like Irish, Welsh, Australian, Canadian, and American Southern. Captions are needed to understand the words. Even then, the captions don’t always help. “He was bottled,” someone said on a show the other night. I heard it, and saw it on the captions. I didn’t understand what it meant. Or another, where a woman in Australia said she’d been “done over.” They also talked about websites spruiking as part of a scam.

When captions go awry, distract me. Yes, I agree, I am easily distracted. That’s not the point. Please bear with me. I start watching the misaligned captions, to see what’s being said, and then wait for it to the characters to deliver the words, and I lose the plot. I know. It’s a small matter to be peeved about – surely I should be more peeved by the abomination that we call modern television or the abomination of the current state of government in America – but this is a first world household.

We have first world problems.

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My Purple Hair

I love my purple hair. Most would call it eggplant. It’s purple in my mind.

Most people can’t see it, though. It doesn’t exist, except in my mind. I’ve never dyed my hair purple, nor any other color. Although I want to, to demonstrate my rebel nature, having purple hair isn’t me. I don’t like attention; purple hair would draw attention.

I cope with a trifurcated opinion about unusually dyed hair, tattoos, and piercings. One, I don’t like them. Two, I admire them. Three, I don’t understand them.

People getting and doing these things must not mind the attention, but I question how much they’re rebelling. With piercings and tattoos becoming more prevalent, it seems less like they’re rebelling, instead conforming in a new way. Maybe they’re not rebelling; that’s part of what I don’t understand.

The same happened with me and my parents. I wore bell-bottoms. My hair was long. Mom and Dad didn’t like either of these things, because it was different. Was I rebelling? No; I was emulating the Who, the Beatles, and other rock and rollers. As I told my parents to their disgusted observations and comments, “But everyone wears them.” I guess that if someone I admired back then dyed their hair purple, I’d have done it, too.

No one did, and I retained my natural hair-color. Some rebel.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s song is “Runnin’ With the Devil,” by Van Halen.

Why? I was writing a scene in my head as I walked through the town’s growing smoke. New wildfires was generating the smoke, and the winds had shifted…and you know how all that goes.

So, with walking, breathing smoke, and writing in my head, my mind started streaming “Runnin’ With the Devil.” VH-1 named this the ninth greatest rock song in history in two thousand nine. I know that after its release in nineteen seventy-eight, it became a jukebox staple in Airman and NCO Clubs and open messes around the world, and stayed there until at least my retirement, in nineteen ninety-five. Why not? The song has that Van Halen hard rock beat, terrific licks for air-guitars, and lyrics easy to understand and sing, in a style that was most could imitate. You know that when it came on in the clubs, many males immediately shifted their attention to singing along.

Feel free to sing along, too.

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Today’s Theme Music

Sentimentality creeps up on me again.

As I was walking, reflecting on my dreams, and writing in my head, a voice slipped past the disparate, disorganized words. Drizzle stole in past trees and fresh, cool air invited me out of myself. Looking around, I thought, “What a wonderful world this can be.”

Not always, mind you. Yeah, we know. We’ve seen the images and we’re still reading the stories.

Of course, the voice I was hearing was Louis Armstrong singing “What A Wonderful World.” Armstrong recorded and released it in nineteen sixty-seven. I first heard it before I was a teenager, but it leaped back into public awareness with the movie, “Good Morning, Vietnam,” in nineteen eighty-seven. Serving in the Air Force and stationed in Germany, I saw it in a theater at Rhein-Main Air Base. “What A Wonderful World” was a sobering moment in the film, as the music was juxtaposed against the young military and the weapons of war. Of course, this is a flawed moment; “Good Morning, Vietnam” was set in nineteen sixty-five. “What A Wonderful World” came out two years later. It works, despite that flaw.

Life moves on. Rhein-Main Air Base closed. My unit and its mission, spying against the Soviet Union, is gone, as are the Soviets. We’ve lost Louis Armstrong and Robin Williams, but I’m part of an era where technology saves us from depending on memories alone, allowing us to more sharply and accurately revisit our past.  So, here it is again, “What A Wonderful World.”

 

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Today’s Theme Music

A memory stays with me.

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.

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