Category: pop culture

Today’s Theme Music

In this age….

And what is this age, this technological age of rising alt news, polarization, nationalism, fascism and repression, what is this age? Sure don’t feel like the Age of Aquarius.

Back in nineteen eighty-five, the world was facing many issues, like the famine in Africa. In the U.K., Bob Geldof responded by organizing Band-Aid. In America, a ‘super-group’ was put together to release an album to help. A group, U.S.A. (United Support of Artists), was put together to help the cause. Produced by Quincy Jones, a song, ‘We Are The World,’ was co-written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie, and arranged by Michael Omartian. Released as part of Live Aid, it helped awaken awareness of the famine in Africa. Other ‘live-aid’ type of events followed as musicians stepped up to help farmers and earthquake victims.

I didn’t particularly like the song, but I appreciate the sentiment and effort. Harry Belafonte was the first spark plug in this effort because he thought something needed to be done, but watch the video and listen to the voices, and see how many artists participated in trying to make a difference. It was a hit; it won awards; it raised money and attracted attention to the problem.

Well, here we are again, with war and terrorism shredding the world. Displaced peoples are seeking the very basics of food, water and shelter, and nations, like America under Trump, want to turn their backs. Insisting, “America First,” he builds walls and bombs other places, because walls and bombs have always been so effective. That’s why the war to end all wars was fought one hundred years ago.

It seems like that was just the opening of a War-apalooza.

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Today’s Theme Music

In these through the looking glass sort of days, I think today’s song is appropriate. Besides, I like its slow beat and long crescendo sort of style as it builds toward a conclusion.

‘White Rabbit’ was written by Grace Slick in the mid nineteen sixties. She and Jefferson Airplane released it in nineteen sixty-seven, and it became a hit. More, the song became forever associated with that era and the psychedelic movement. In me, an eleven-year-old growing up in America, was inspiration to think more and challenge beliefs and opinions, but it also fired my creativity. The song references Lewis Carroll’s characters from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking Glass’ and discusses sensory distortion with those characters. The lyrics employ the logic that I always enjoyed, an encouragement to look at the world differently.

Of course, its drug overtones and association with drugs through popular culture worried mom. Still, I like streaming it in my head as I walk about, especially the way that Grace sings, “If you go chasing rabbits.”

It’s a treat to find this YouTube offering from the Smothers Brothers. Loved that show.

The weirdest thing for me now about Grace Slick and this song was that she was just four years younger than mom, and Grace is now seventy-seven years old.

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Today’s Theme Music

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.

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Today’s Theme Music

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.

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Today’s Theme Music

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.

Sing it with them.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

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.

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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

“I’ve been happy lately, thinking about the good things to come.”

I love that sentiment. Sometimes I actually have the satisfaction of experiencing it as well. At those times, I think, “Really? With all the world crap happening, and the misfortune being experienced, I’m happy, and thinking about the good things to come.”

Maybe I’m insane or irrationally hopeful. Maybe I’m just an optimist, or perhaps I’m attuned to something else others can’t yet see or feel yet.

Yeah, I’m staying with insane.

Cat Stevens wrote the line I opened with and sang it in 1971 hit, ‘Peace Train’. Cat Stevens converted to Islam a few years later and took the name, Yusuf Islam. Some hold that against him.

I don’t. I enjoy his music and wish him well. ‘Peace Train’ is good theme music to hum as you take on the world today. Let its words and melody lift you up, just a little, this first day of April.

 

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