Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
This is one of my favorite songs. The voice, words, sentiment and tempo all suit me. From nineteen seventy-one, I don’t know when or where I first heard it. I sometimes stream it to myself. This is a song I loved, but I never owned a copy. Its truths remain true: what happened to our blue skies? What are we doing to the animals with radiation underground? Why do so many give so little care or interest about the planet’s ecology?
Here’s Marvin Gaye with ‘Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)’.
Today’s selection is streaming from nineteen seventy-one.
A year of personal change, this was the year I moved in with Dad. He’d just returned from Germany and was assigned to DESC in the Dayton, Ohio, area. We lived in Page Manor housing.
I was fifteen. It was the year I met my wife, although that didn’t become known to me for a few years. This song, ‘Signs’, by the Five Man Electrical Band, suited my milieu. Tesla later did a decent cover, but my stream is sentimental today, so I hung with the original.
I was a long-haired freaky person, so the words speak to me: “Signs, signs, everywhere signs. Blocking our scenery, breaking my mind. Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the signs?” I was rebelling against signs and the conformance they urged and demands they made. Signs still inundate our lives, and if there’s not a sign, there’s probably an app.
Here it is, ‘Signs’.
Visiting with Mom, my brain stream naturally turns toward the music I heard then. One of my favorites of nineteen seventy-one was ‘Brown Sugar’ by the Rolling Stones. I was fifteen then and thought, “This is rock and roll.”
Hope you have a good Sunday. Hope you enjoy the song.
“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.
Michael Seidel, writer 