Tag: 1970

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

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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Today’s Theme Music

Ah, today, we have a classic. Ray Davis took his music seriously. I’ve done one of the Kinks’ songs before, but it’s time to bring on ‘Lola’. I vividly remember talking about this song with my sister and my neighbor, John. Sis was two years older. It was a warm summer day in 1970, and we were in our backyard in Penn Hills, PA.

I later saw the Kinks in concert in Germany. We were in a pink marbled concert hall. It was so damn elegant, it was amazing, washing the Kinks concert experience with a surreal veneer.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s song is right out of the American pop-rock scene of the nineteen seventies. It’s by a Canadian group who had a handful of hits and multiple excellent albums.

That’s the Guess Who. Love those rock band names. Today’s song is ‘American Woman’. People have argued about the lyric’s intentions since it came out. I once read one of the song-writers quoting John Lennon to the effect that a song’s meanings emerge after they’re recorded and that someone else needs to interpret them. I was writing a paper comparing the writing styles of Kurt Vonnegut and Mario Puzo at the time. I’d read some comments by them about how readers find meanings that the writers never intended. That doesn’t make those meanings wrong or illegitimate.

I was beginning to see and understand that in literature, art and music. People find their own meanings. It’s always fascinating then to hear people argue about these things as though they’re absolutes, and not shaped by own lives and dreams.

And it reminds me of eating food. People are always insisting to others, “Try this, it’s great, you’ll love it!” But tastes buds are also tastes, aren’t they? Sure. Try convincing others of that. They take your disagreement as a personal insult.

That’s what many Americans did with ‘American Woman’. They disagreed with what they saw as the song’s meaning and rejected it. I’ve had people tell me that they hate this song, because it was about hating America to them.

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Today’s Theme Song

I was a racing fanatic when I was young. I followed NASCAR, Formula 1, Indy, Can-Am, Trans-Am, SCCA amateur racing, and sports cars racing, such as LeMans.

Nineteen seventy-three was a disaster for the Indy 500. Rain delayed the race. Several fatalities happened in practice and in the race. Among them, Swede Savage was killed. ABC Sports was showing the race. They put a montage of images together about the race and used James Taylor’s song, ‘Fire and Rain’, as the soundtrack. Gordon Johncock, in a Patrick Racing Eagle-Offy, was eventually declared the winner.

At the same time, I’d moved out from Mom’s house, and in with Dad. He’d been in the USAF. We lived in Ohio, at Wright-Pat, but he retired, and he and I moved south, to West Virginia. We lived with someone else for a bit until we got a place. It burned down within a month of moving in. All our possessions were gone. Among the items burned was the check to the insurance company. Nothing was insured. It wasn’t a good start.

I’d had a crush on a girl, Susie, and she liked me, but moving away ended all of that. The song ‘Fire and Rain’ had a line, “Susanne, the plans they made put an end to you.” I took that personally when I heard that song during that tragic race. I knew Susie and I had changed. Never very socially engaged, in a new school with a curriculum that was a few years behind what I knew, I became more withdrawn.

I knew the song from its nineteen seventy release. That’s when Susie and I started hanging out together sometimes. Its connection to the tragic and disastrous nineteen seventy-three Indy 500 and my life changes shifted the way I think about that era, and that song. Yet, the song is a comfort. Although I emerged more withdrawn, I think I emerged more thoughtful, mature and independent. But, now, from the vantage that times’ passing can give, I see, too, that I became more emotionally detached, and I remain like that.

This is not what I thought I’d share today. I guess it just comes from where I’m at in the moment.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

This song was originally performed by a small, little known group called the Beatles. The song itself was written by an obscure songwriter named Paul McCartney. I think he may have written one or two other songs that also charted as a hit somewhere. None come to mind.

I preferred the cover of this song by a guy name Joe Cocker. Not many people are familiar with his work but he had a minor hit with his cover of this song, ‘She Came in Through the Bathroom Window’, in nineteen seventy. I find it a soothing song to stream while tramping about. Cheers

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Today’s Theme Music

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.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

Man, I’ll tell you what, the music emerging during the 1960s and 1970s was part of an amazing scene. Listening to those old songs give me a lift. This particular group, song and album were polarizing. When Mom heard me listening to this, she asked, “What is that you’re listening to?”

“Black Sabbath.”

Two words which probably did little to calm her. “Black Sabbath?”

“Yes. This is ‘Paranoid’.”

This woman who enjoyed Barbra Streisand, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, the Ink Spots, Platters, Nat King Cole, and on and on, studied me for seconds with mild distaste. Announcing, “It sounds paranoid,” she returned to her housekeeping routine and then called back, “Turn it down.”

Turn it down was something I’d hear a lot in those days.

Here we have it, a little gem called ‘Paranoid’, with Ozzy Osbourne on vocals, Tony Iommi on lead guitar, Geezer on bass and Bill Ward playing the drums, from 1970.

Get out your air guitar and turn it up.

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Today’s Theme Music

“I like to dream….”

Yeah, I like to dream. Sometimes I’m bothered that I experience so many nocturnal dreams, often three to five per night that I remember. But many of the dreams are positive and uplifting.

Likewise, I like to dream and write in my head, spinning stories to myself that are written too fast and fluidly to ever find its place in reality for others to enjoy. I work at writing and publishing fiction but it is work. Besides wanting stories that keep their attention, people want correct spelling, grammar and punctuation. They want consistency and explanation. Many are also interested in ‘facts’.

Facts, bah. I’m a fiction writer.

No matter, they retort.

Bah. They’re such sticklers.

This spin of thoughts spun me back into one of my favorite early albums, Steppenwolf Live’. I wore the vinyl off that mutha. I have several favorite songs from it but went with one that resonates best with me as a dream: Magic Carpet Ride.

Ride with me as the ‘wolf performs it in Santa Monica back in 1970.

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Today’s Theme Music

Pulling one out of the memory cloud, I came up with a classic. ‘Black Magic Woman’ was written by Peter Green and performed by Fleetwood Mac.

I did not much care for that song and rarely heard it.

Two years later, Carlos Santana put it on ‘Abraxas’. I think that’s the one most people know. Most people think Santana wrote ‘Black Magic Woman’, and are unaware of Fleetwood Mac’s version. I’m speaking of the people I know in America. Other peoples in other countries, or or other ages and persuasions, may know differently.

The differences, IMO, is that Green came up with the lyrics but he and his band couldn’t provide it with the musical structure needed. Carlos, on the other hand, with his powerful licks set against that soft, mysterious organ, a steady bass that sings the lyrics at times, a Latin beat, and Gregg Rolie’s vocals, seems like a much more fully realized vision.

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