Another song was lined up for today’s theme music but the streaming cortex bumped into shuffle.
Stumbling and mumbling through dream fragments scudding across my thinking, the routines of feeding cats, pondering cold therapy, and contemplating breakfast and rain, a wash of first world self-pity swept me. Out of the melange of thoughts emerged an old familiar:
“Yeah, you go back, Jack, do it again – wheel turning around and around. You go back, Jack, do it again.”
Yep, let’s go back, Jack, and do it again. Let’s do it all again. Here’s Steely Dan with ‘Do It Again’ from 1972. Maybe it’ll alleviate some first world rainy Tuesday blues.
Yesterday’s theme music ‘Me and Mrs. Jones’ was dedicated to Tucker and his paramour from next door, Pepper. Today’s music centers around Meep.
Meep is the young ginger Tom we began feeding and sheltering. He started living more and more with us. His ‘owners’ moved away, leaving him to live with us. “He’s an outdoor cat,” we heard they told another neighbor. “We worry about him.”
No, he isn’t an outdoor cat. He loves curling up on a bed or chair and snoozing the hours away. No, they didn’t worry about him, or they would have known that about him.
A cat who likes gallivanting about doing good, Meep always does a grand entrance. They crack me up. Whether he’s been knocking on a window or door for entrance or we open the door to call him in, he gallops in. After executing a rub and twirl around my legs, he gallops across the room to the other side of the house. If he’s going from back to front, his dash ends with a majestic slide across the hardwood floor.
As a spectator, theme music for these entrances have come to me and I’ve started singing it to him when he performs. The song is ‘Flash’ by Queen, from the movie, ‘Flash Gordon’, 1980. Of course, I sing, “Meep,” instead of Flash. It pleases him. He knows he a Flash and that he’s saved every one of us. And when Freddie sings about Flash being a man, the words must be changed to cat.
Tucker is ‘my’ cat. Sick, hungry and lost, he came to us through the smoky summer haze a few years ago. We were in a drought. Wildfires surrounded our valley. Temperatures were running one hundred degrees Fahrenheit plus. Going outside without a mask wasn’t recommended. Two of my cats were dying with cancer, as was one of my best friends. It was a challenging period.
Tucker is sweet but he fights other cats. They know this and fear it. We’re vigilant to keep him away from all of them except Quinn.
Enter Pepper, the long-haired black and nutmeg calico with a black face and green eyes. Pepper lives next door but enjoys our porch. She’s always hanging around the front door. Although she’s well-fed and healthy, she begs for meals. I feed her because, as my my wife claims, I’ve never met a cat who doesn’t need a meal.
Pepper terrifies dogs, raccoons and other cats. She has the battle cry down, loud and furious, like she’s going all ninja cat on them. She rarely fights, issuing the cries and making a lunge or two. It’s enough to intimidate other cats.
Except Tucker. He and Pepper sit side-by-side on the front mat, peaceful and relaxed. Open the door and they lift their heads and look up and back over their shoulders with synchronized perfection.
It seems like a strange little love affair. So for them, from 1972, is Billy Paul performing Me and Mrs. Jones’ on Soul Train.
I put the mental stream on shuffle and then sorted through the tunes. Two ended up as potential for today’s theme music.
One was The Blues Brothers singing ‘Rawhide’ in their movie. I’m not certain how the stream came to that.
The other was ‘Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)’, released in 1991 by C+C Music Factory. I’d just returned from a tour in Germany and was settling into the SF Bay Area when I first heard it. This song was ubiquitous. I found its sound intriguing but more, enjoyed going to a club and seeing everyone’s reaction when the song was played. The floor could be empty, with people milling around, chatting and sipping. Then, “Everybody dance now,” blared out. People reacted like they’d be ordered, moving and rushing the floor. Amazing.
Of course, I also adapted this song to my cats, ‘singing’ “Everybody eat now,” when I fed them. They reacted just like the dancers at the clubs, eating like they’d been given an order that must be obeyed.
It’s a good, energetic Friday song. You heard Martha. Everybody dance now.
Today’s music arrived with the sun. ‘When Doves Cry’ by Prince is pretty well known so I’ll eschewed any mention about what I was doing and where I was at when it came out. This is especially so with Prince’s sudden death last year. Instead, I’ll mention that it’s one of my cat songs.
Now for the embarrassing aspect. Ahem. A cat song is one I sing to my cats. I typically change the words to reflect that it’s for or about cats. In this instance, some of the words are revised to be, “This is what it sounds like, when a cat purrs.”
And the song arrived with the sun because that’s when a cat arrived with an introductory purr, pretending to be friendly, when he was really inquiring about breakfast.
Here it is, ‘When Doves Cry’, 1984, by the amazing, amazing Prince. Feel free to sing it to your animals.
We listened to a lot of music while I was stationed on Okinawa in the early 1980s. Drank a lot of beer, too. Smoked a lot of cigars, played a lot of Risk and worked a lot. We also went to college.
Anyway, back to the music thing. The Internet wasn’t around. CD players and Compact Discs were just emerging. For reference, the hot new computer was the TRS 80.
So we played a lot of vinyl, recording it onto more portable, user friendly formats. One album that came out then was Foreigner 4, by Foreigner. Several hits were on that album, including this song, ‘Juke Box Hero’. Later generations and listeners might be familiar with the song through its commercial use.
Stream it in your head as you’re walking around dreaming of heroes and villians.
Today’s song, from the Cure, came out in the early nineteen nineties. I was fortunate to be stationed at Onizuka Air Station when it did. Originally called Sunnyvale Air Station, it was located on Lockheed acreage that was rented from them for one dollar a year. The Blue Cube dominated the site. I wrote about it in another post.
The location had been renamed in honor of Ellison Onizuka, an astronaut killed in the Challenger disaster. Dedicated to space operations, we were wedged between roads just off of Highway 101. The area was interesting for the Internet boom just underway at the time. Navigator, Yahoo, MapQuest and other new companies were part of our landscape. It was an energetic, prosperous time, and the music coming out seemed to reflect that.
Except for this song. I actually find it repetitious and inane. That’s true about many rock and pop songs, which is why I like Weird Al’s parodies of them. This song seems like audible sedatives. That’s my opinion; you may really enjoy it.
Either way, it’s been stuck in my head since last night. Basically, I realized that I’d passed anniversaries of several major life events. March, 1991, was the first year that I lived in the SF Bay Area/Silicon Valley/Peninsula after returning from duty in Germany. Memories from that period have unearthed songs and invaded my dreams this week.
Here’s the Cure with ‘Friday I’m In Love, from 1992.
Reflective mood today from dredges of disturbing dreams. Today’s selection is a double offering from Jackson Browne’s 1977 album, ‘Running on Empty’. Here’s ‘Load Out/Stay’.
The first song begins as a quiet and pensive reflection on touring before shifting into something more triumphant and uplifting in ‘Stay’. They’re pleasant accompaniment to walking through the day while thinking about what is and isn’t.
I awoke with this song stuck in my head. It wasn’t the song I had in mind for today.
Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote ‘One Less Bell to Answer’ in the 1960s. The ‘Fifth Dimension’ had a hit with it around 1970.
The 1960s and 1970s was a great era of music. We had surfer music, blues, R&B, folk, psychedelic, country and western, and the British Invasion all being blasted from our AM radios. Many of the acts appeared on television and music shows, like ‘American Bandstand’ with Dick Clark, or ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’.
Oddly, the song is connected to a time of transition for me. That gives me pause as I wonder why the song is stuck in my brain today. My family lived in the Pittsburgh, PA, area, having moved to that area in the late 1950s. We had lived in a brick duplex in Wilkinsburg. My aunt and her family lived next door to us in a like duplex. Her son, my cousin, was my age. We were best friends for a long time.
His family moved to a new housing development in Penn Hills in the 1960s. We also moved there a few weeks later. I ended up living about two blocks from him.
Meanwhile, though, my other friends remained in Wilkinsburg. I made it a habit to return to visit them. I usually rode my bike the miles between the two locations. Then my bike was stolen and I walked.
But my friends changed. I no longer felt a part of them and moved on. That’s why it’s interesting this song is stuck in my head this morning. Between my dream and my writing and this song, I wonder what conference is going on in my subconscious mind.
Here’s Marilyn McCoo and the Fifth Dimension, performing ‘One Less Bell to Answer’ on Soul Train.
Today’s song is one of many that suffered from mondegreens. ‘Alive and Kicking’ by Simple Minds came out in 1985. Stationed at Shaw AFB in SC after returning from Okinawa, I was assigned to the 1701 MOBSS.
I lived in Columbia, about twenty-nine miles away, and a straight shot down the highway. The MOB in our unit designation was short for mobility. We went on temporary duty to other locations regularly. Sometimes I drove to those locations, such as Eglin AFB in Florida. Between that and my daily commute between Columbia and Shaw, I listened to a bit of radio.
When the song came out, I swore they were sometimes singing, “I like the chicken.” Naturally, that’s what I walked around singing. Still do when I stream the song in my head.
Here they are. From 1985, Simple Minds with ‘Alive and Kicking’.
