Category: pop culture

Today’s Theme Music

The Wayback Machine started streaming music from nineteen sixty-seven this morning. I don’t know what triggered that setting. Maybe it was that I read a VOX article ranking the best Rolling Stones songs yesterday, and several of the top ten seemed to be from the mid to late sixties.

At any rate, from the Stones came a Van Morrison connection. I enjoy his voice and style and found myself singing several of his songs, including ‘Brown Eyed Girl’. I’ve always enjoyed the simple melody and nostalgic, evocative lyrics. Much later in life, I discovered that the song’s lyrics were too suggestive for the radio. I learned it at the same time that I became educated on ‘Wake Up Little Susie’s’ shocking lyrics. I’ve also read, but haven’t been able to vet this, that Van Morrison didn’t think much of his hit.

His thoughts on his song doesn’t change my impressions of it. I hope you enjoy it, and that the lyrics don’t offend you too much.

 

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Whetting Desire

There was no warning of what was about to happen.

The other and I jumped into the car. Directing it onto the Interstate, we sped to another town for two days and a night of dining elsewhere, shopping, reading and relaxing. Our mini-vacation choice puzzled friends, but that’s life. Being out there, though, staying in a hotel, reading and eating at restaurants without any damn cares whet my desire for more of that life.

My wife felt it, too. “Wouldn’t it be great to just keep driving and go to another town, stay another night?”

Yep, it sure would.

Meanwhile —

I was writing yesterday, working on the novel in progress. It was a fabulous writing day. I jumped right into that writing and editing phase after some deep thinking and writing in my head that took place while driving and shopping the day before. Terribly rewarding, it whet my appetite to spend my hours doing nothing but writing and drinking coffee.

Suddenly — 

I read about Bertha, the TBM. Some quick pedantic explanation: a TBM is a tunnel boring machine. Bertha was the one used in Seattle in the tunnel construction to replace the Alaska Way Viaduct. The A.W.V. had been damaged in the six point eight magnitude earthquake in two thousand one. Bertha had just completed its part, breaking out of the earth and into its disassembly area.

The article whet my appetite for big endeavors like digging a tunnel. I wished I’d pursued an engineering degree. Then I might have been part of amazing projects like this.

I must admit, too, the child residing just under my skin said, “Bertha. Bertha Butt. One of the Butt Sisters.” Recognize it? It’s just how my infantile mind makes connections.

But then, without warning — 

I watched the first episode of American Gods again. Suddenly, I wanted to watch the next one, right now. Then I watched the Handmaid’s Tale. It whet my appetite for more, as did Red Rock when I watched its episodes.

It just seems to be one of those periods. I’m restless, excited and energetic. Life and its demands feels like a straitjacket. Time plods along, and impatience snaps a whip. Everything whets my appetite for more, now.

But, alas —

I know this period will shift. Maybe I just slept more, so I feel more rested and have more energy. My Fitbit claims I slept seven and a half hours, an hour more than my usual. Perhaps this energy and mood is the product of my dreams when I slept. They all seemed empowering…from what I remember….

Regardless —

Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

I know exactly where to begin today.

2

Unmatched

I have a middle-class American white boy penchant for matching my clothes. I’ve always done this. Mom encouraged it, conforming encouraged it and my wife encouraged it.

I was dismayed how easily I matched today in shades of gray and white – walking shorts, sweatshirt, shirt, shoes. Jaysus. Initiating a minor rebellion, I wore mis-matched socks: one is white, and the other is dark gray. Individually, each matches the ensemble, but not each other.

My choice pleased me but I admit to feeling a little askew. Then I wondered, who is going to notice this?

It’s been an hour. I walked half a mile, entered the coffee shop, visited with some friends, ordered my coffee, and bantered with the barista. Nobody has noticed my socks – or if they did, they didn’t comment on them.

I’m such a rebel.

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Today’s Theme Music

Another anniversary was passed. This one was less remembered and noted than many anniversaries.

Today’s song is ‘Ohio’, by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSN&Y). The Kent State shootings inspired the song when Ohio National Guardsman shot at protesters, killing four, in nineteen seventy. Nine others were wounded. Some of those shot were watching the protest or walking the area, and not taking part in the protests.

I vividly remember hearing the song for the first time. It was a warm morning, but humid after thunderstorms the previous night, and our patch of suburbia was richly green. I was in my friend’s back yard in Penn Hills, PA. Curt lived up the street from me. He, John, Ricky and Bruce, all neighbors and classmates (except Bruce), were the core of my friendships. Curt’s back yard was slick with mud from the heavy rains. Mosquitoes were swarming, along with horse flies.

The Kent State protests were mostly about President Nixon’s Cambodia Campaign, just announced. It seems appropriate for our era, as we’re protesting an American Executive branch’s words, actions, behavior and stated intentions, to listen to this song and think about the words. Appallingly, I saw an FB post encouraging ‘vets’ to run over protesters. It sickened my heart to read such sentiments. Is that why vets went to war, to return and run over others exercising their rights and freedoms?

Some seem to have twisted ideas about how it all works.

Speaking as a vet and knowing many vets, I don’t believe most of them think protesters should be run over. Maybe I’m in a bubble, and I’m wrong. We used to say, I don’t agree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it. So, on the one hand, yes, the person can encourage vets to run over protesters, as it’s their right, but I find their sentiment sublimely hateful, ignorant, and depressing.

This song captured how appalled some of us were then. I remember being surprised that my friends were unaware of the Kent State shootings or what it was all about. Their parents were aware but guarded. Looking back, I grasp how conservative that housing plan where I lived was at the time.

Listen to the song, though, and the chorus, “Four dead in Ohio,” stays with you.

 

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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.

7

Today’s Theme Music

I moved in with Dad in nineteen seventy-one. I was fifteen. He was in the U.S. Air Force, and had returned from Vietnam by way of Germany (where he had a gorgeous blue Mustang convertible). Now assigned to DESC, Wright-Pat AFB provided administrative support. We lived on Page Manor military base housing.

That lasted about three months. Presented with an opportunity and having his years in, Dad retired from the Air Force. We moved to southern West Virginia. After moving into a place, it burned down. If we didn’t lose our possessions to fire, we lost them to smoke and water damage. He and I spent a month living in a friend’s home but it was small and cramped. Unable to find anything else, Dad bought a seventy-foot long, fourteen foot wide mobile home and rented a space in Doy Mobile Home Park.

In retrospect, Dad lived through an interesting period then. He re-married when I was sixteen, almost seventeen. New offspring soon followed. Graduating high-school, and with a second child on the way to join Dad’s household, I joined the military and left.

Dad had two young sons by the year’s end. One of them was killed in a car accident. The loss destroyed his marriage. He ended up having an affair with a co-worker. Her marriage was disintegrating. Her husband was already suffering emotional issues, and committed suicide. Dad moved in with the widow. That all took place in a six year run.

From that era comes a song that makes me laugh. Ranked as one of the greatest pop songs of all time, it came out in nineteen seventy-two. Carly Simon’s song, You’re So Vain’, stays in conversations about who the song is about. She’s given clues. Others claim she’s confided in them. Men like Warren Beatty insisted the song was about him.

Whatever. Here it is.

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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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