Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
I have stones on my mind today. Probably will for for several more days to weeks. Hard to say with kidney stones.
With those as my guide and inspiration from another blogger, Kenneth, I started streaming some Bob Dylan this morning. Of course, it’s the 1965 classic, “Like A Rolling Stone”. It felt like it took years to understand the lyrics, but as a kid, I always liked the intonation of, “Like a rolling stone.”
Today’s theme music emerged from my dreamlands. As I stumbled around feeding the scamperbeasts and making coffee, I remembered the little I know about the song
It wasn’t much. An AM radio hit in the mid 1960s, I was troubled by the title. I thought it was “Hang On Snoopy”. When I discovered it was Sloopy, I thought, “Who’s Sloopy?” I knew who Snoopy was. I understood why they were urging Snoopy to hang on, seeing that he slept on his back on top of his dog house and battled the Red Baron, but who was Sloopy that they were telling them to hang on? It made no sense to me.
Thanks to Wikipedia, I discovered that the version of “Hang On Sloopy” by The McCoys came out in 1965, so I was nine. Sloopy is rumored to be Dorothy Sloop, a jazz singer.
All interesting stuff, but surprisingly, the McCoy’s vocalist on the recording is Rick Zehringer. The group performing the music was not his group from Rick and the Raiders, but another group called the Strangeloves. Rick and the Raiders’s name was changed to the McCoys for the release of “Hang On Sloopy”, and Rick Zehringer, who was eighteen when he sang “Hang On Sloopy”, changed his name to Rick Derringer, under which he continues to perform pop, rock, and blues and playing with people and groups from Edgar Winter, Johnny Winter, Barbra Streisand, and Meat Loaf, to television jingles for Budweiser beer commercials.
That’s a lot of pop history from one song. Anyway, hang on…whoever you are.
Don’t know why I’m streaming today’s music. Are you surprised? Shocked, I am, totally shocked.
Anyway, today’s theme music was a pop hit that came to be part of my life music stream via my sister. I was nine when this song was a hit. Two years older, my sister was a popster and a big fan of the forty-fives. The Dave Clark Five were a Brit invasion pop group. Sis loved them. No surprise, then, that their 1965 hit “Over and Over”, has escaped my brain’s shields and entered my stream.
What’s perhaps more surprising is how little I hear this song on the radio. After remembering it, I looked the group up on that Internet. There, through Wikipedia, I discovered the Dave Clark Five had a run of hits, disbanded in 1970, and were inducted into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2008.
Love the video’s dancing display. Ah, those were the days, hey?
Today’s song, “Nowhere Man,” by the Beatles, came out in 1965. I vividly remember carrying a small transistor radio (with a nine volt battery) and listening to this song early one summer afternoon, singing along with it as I walked along Laketon Road in Wilkinsburg, Pa. The lyrics were simple but seemed powerful to me.
It must have been in 1966, and I was ten when I was doing that. Fifty-two years later, I’m walking along A Street in Ashland, Or., singing it to myself in an early late summer morning. It still seems like simple but powerful song.
Long hair and suits. That seemed to be part of the transition from blues to rock & pop.
“For Your Love” by the Yardbirds was part of that transition. I like watching this video for these pieces – the suits and hair, the somewhat bored or impassive expressions of the band members, the band’s setup, and what seems like a tiny, tiny drum set. Everything was simpler. This video was from 1965, and within a few years, changes would be visible in how pop/rock stars should dress and act. Fun to have YouTube and the associated technology to look back into the early years of the rock era.
I learned this song from the AM radio when I was very young. I began thinking about “The Name Game” this morning, but remembering “The Clapping Song,” I switched to it. I loved its rhythms and clapping when I was a child. Come on, they’re fun lyrics and easy to learn:
Three, six, nine, the goose drank wine,
The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line
The line broke, the monkey got choked,
They all went to heaven in a little row-boat
Clap-Pat
Clap-Pat
Clap-Pat
Clap-Slap
Clap-Pat: Clap your hand, pat it on your partner’s hand (right hand)
Clap-Pat: Clap your hand, cross it with your left arm, pat your partner’s left palm
Clap-Pat: Clap your hand, pat your partner’s right palm with your right palm again
Clap-Slap: Clap your hands, slap your thighs, and sing a little song; go:
My mother told me
If I was good-ee
That she would buy me
A rubber dolly
My aunty told her
I kissed a soldier
Now she won’t buy me
A rubber dolly
I didn’t know that Shirley Ellis sang it. Honestly, when I learned this song, it all came from that magical place called the radio. It wasn’t for a few years that I realized that those voices and music represented individual people. Yeah, I was a little slow. After hearing the song when I was older, I wondered about the age of a person who was being promised a rubber dolly but wasn’t being given one because she kissed a soldier.
I heard this one on Santa Clarita Diet last night. It’s been so long since I last heard it. The song, as performed by the Animals, came out in 1965. “It’s My Life” checks all the marks for that era’s emerging rock for me, giving me an enjoyable nostalgia rush today. I liked the lyrics and Burdon’s rusty, defiant, angry delivery – “It’s my life, and I’ll do what I want.” That’s a perfect anthem for a nine-year-old, right? Hah, yeah.
Today’s music came out in 1965, when I was nine. I lived in Wilkinsburg, PA, around that time. A group of us liked going into one girl’s basement and pretending we were musicians, singers, and daughters. The Outsiders, Monkees, Nancy Sinatra, Johnny Rivers, the Turtles, and Paul Revere and the Raiders provided us with our music via forty-five RPM records. We’d take turns performing. It was a way to spend time. I don’t know who provided us with that record collection.
Anyway, “Time Won’t Let Me” by The Outsiders, was one of those songs. Later, after reading the book, and then much later, when I saw the movie, I wondered if the Outsiders had taken their name from the novel. Then I found that the band existed before the novel. Oh, well.
As an aside, the movie was interesting. Francis Ford Coppola directed it. The cast was an amazing ensemble of young stars. Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Ralph Macchio, Diane Lane, and Matt Dillon all come readily to mind.
One final aside, I read the novel around 1970, when a teacher recommended it to me. The novel is controversial and remains one of the most frequently challenged books in America.
Confession: I didn’t know who sang this song. Nor do I remember the first time I heard it. After looking up the artist, I still didn’t know who he was, but I knew the song from AM radio.
“Down in the Boondocks” apparently came out in 1965. I was nine. The performer with the hit was Billy Joe Royal. After googling him, I found I knew several of his songs, like “Cherry Hill Park.”
“Down in the Boondocks” started streaming in my head while I was talking to Tucker (one of my cats) and emptying the dishwasher. Yeah, I don’t see the connection either.
Remember the television series called “Get Smart”? It was on in the mid-sixties. Buck Henry and Mel Brooks came up with the idea. Don Adams and Barbara Feldon were the primary stars.
A crazy spy-spoof, “Get Smart” featured an organization called CONTROL, shoe phones, the cone of silence, and other unique devices that made fun of the spy gadgets populating more serious spy ventures. Don Adams was a bumbling spy known as Maxwell Smart, a.k.a. Agent 86. Smart always doing things by the book, even though doing so was counter-productive. Feldon was Agent 99. She seemed more competent and intelligent, but 86 often ended up saving 99, mostly by accident, it seemed. The two of them, along with Chief, and other agents of CONTROL, fought the forces of KAOS.
The opening sequence showed Adams as Smart marching through corridors toward walls while the theme music played. As he reached each wall, a door would open, let Smart through, and close behind him. Once he’d gone through a number of doors in this manner, he reached a telephone booth. There, he’d put in a coin and dial a number, and then wait until he was lowered from the booth.
I was reminded of this sequence often during my military career. Working in S.C.I.F.s, underground command posts, vaults, and buildings without windows, that television show’s theme music would stream into my head as we went around corners, up halls, and through doors, often without seeing other people. The biggest differences from the television show were that we all wore badges, security cameras abounded in our halls, signs warning about unauthorized access and the use of deadly force were frequent, and getting past the doors usually required us to punch numbers into a cypher-lock.
There were also red-tiled zones where only one person was authorized to stand or be at a time, to help keep the entrance secure. In later years, we also encountered retinal scans in little booths that weighed you as you looked into a scanner and entered the numbers to pass through. Your weight was on record and accessed via your badge. A five-pound leeway was permitted. This was done under the watchful eyes of security people and cameras.
That was over twenty years ago. I wonder if they still do all those things? They’ve probably moved on to comparing DNA by now.
Michael Seidel, writer 