Once again, I’m streaming music in via the Wayback Machine. This time, the rotary dial has spun around and landed on an Allman Brothers Band offering.
I spent hours listening to the ABA when I was in my teens, first on thirty-three R.P.M. vinyl, and then on cassette and open reels. I’d get prone on the shag-rug carpeting, lights off and the volume up, and let the music pummel me. I’d moved through those mediums seeking faithful fidelity, free of wow and flutter, and buzz and hum. Yes, I was insane.
“Ramblin Man,” written by band-member Dickey Betts, came out in seventy-three, when I was entering my senior year at high school. The song is off the album, “Brothers and Sisters.” A popular song, it’s probably one of ABA’s best known releases.
I offer it for your Tuesday pleasure, but it’s acceptable to enjoy it on other days.
Today’s theme song comes from last night’s activities. We attended the Rock the Resistance last night, an Indivisible fund raiser for Oregon District Two. Local talent performed. We have terrific local talent, like the Rogue Suspects, LEFT, and Girls Just Want to Have Fun. One of the songs performed was “Higher Ground.”
Written and recorded by Stevie Wonder in nineteen seventy-three, when I was still getting my eyes opened in high school, it’s an uplifting song, perfect for a fund-raiser supporting the “Resist!” movement. While dancing, singing along, and sipping a beer, I thought of the rest of the world. War in Myanmar. Flooding in Asia. Evacuations for Hurricane Irma. Eyes on Hurricane Jose. Texas and Louisiana recovering from Hurricane Harvey. Mexico recovering from an earthquake. Wars on going on everywhere, driving people from their lands into a search for safety, and wild fires burning in Canada, America’s Pacific Northwest, and California. It’s a mess, ain’t it?
It ain’t new. All these things have always been going on. War, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes have always been with us.
One hundred years ago, in nineteen seventeen, learning about other’s catastrophe and trying to help them out would have taken some time. Now, updates come by the second via digital channels, satellites, and social media, and connect us to one another.
Watching disasters and wars on my monitors and televisions while sipping coffee at home demonstrates how fast technology has outraced our thinking, culture, and politics. We’re together but isolated. We don’t need to be. Dare I say that we need a significant paradigm shift?
Yes. Technology is going to keep racing by. And look how much of it is conceived and designed in one locale, manufactured in another location, and sold and used in other places. We need each other. Meanwhile, countries are starting to man the borders to shut others out. It’s backward behavior. Fear drives many of these actions. Hatred contributes, and ignorance amplifies and sustains this backward behavior.
We’re one world. We’re one tribe. We keep spiting others, and end up spiting ourselves. Come on, people, we need to get our shit together. Time to start trying, and keep on trying, until we reach a higher ground. That’s the paradigm shift needed: we need to stop thinking in terms of nations, and think in terms of people, without regard for anything except that we’re all people.
I awoke with, “Hey mister tambourine man, play a song for me,” streaming through my head. It’s a mellow classic, innit? Yeah, and much too mellow for me that morning. I’ve not really been a mellow music man. I prefer something harder, with screaming vocals, slashing guitars, and a hailstorm of drumming.
Ah, what better than “Highway Star,” by Deep Purple, from the “Made In Japan” live album. It’s not soulful, but elemental, and probably in the top five on my fave list of live rock albums, due to the sentimentality of who I was when I first heard it. I had it on eight track, and wore that mutha out. It became first, comical, and then, irritating, as the eight track slowly lost its fidelity and developed lots of warble, wow and flutter. It was, like, woof. Eventually, I quit listening to it, but once CDs came out over a decade later, I hunted down a remastered copy.
Listening to it, I’m back in high school, with the lights off and the music up, riding a sonic wave.
As I’ve aged and semi-matured, I’ve developed fondness for certain performers. (Semi-matured; sounds like an adjective for a wine or cheese.) For example, when I used to hear Dame Judi Dench’s or Helen Mirren’s name attached to something, it automatically dialed up my interest level. I thought they were sensational actresses, and I thought they were more adept at selecting scripts and projects. Same with books and music.
In music, Billy Preston was one of those names for me. No matter the venue or music genre, I always enjoyed Preston’s performances. He had several high-charting songs, including this one, “Will It Go Round in Circles.” He has co-writer credit on the song with Bruce Fisher. Bruce and Billy also co-wrote, “You Are So Beautiful,” and “Nothing From Nothing.” A talented guy, but he seemed to deliver an energy to his music, and I admired that.
For your Monday listening pleasure, streaming from a television appearance recorded in nineteen seventy-three, Billy Preston.
The song came out in nineteen seventy-three, which was the spring of my adulthood. Seventeen, I was living in West Virginia with my father. He was newly retired from the U.S. Air Force. Then entering my senior year of high school, I was finding love and thinking about the future beyond classes. Nothing was working out as planned, so I was winging it, the process by which I’d end up living my life: just wing that mutha.
“Ballroom Blitz,” by Sweet, nicely captures and conveys the chaos and pathos of that period as hormones and emotions took over, and I impatiently pursued life.
Had beers (Caldera Pilot Rock Porter for me, thanks) with my friends last night. A staid group, they’re retired materials and sound engineers, doctors, university professors, and physicists. A small group, just eight last night, I’m the youngest by eight years. None of those present last night knew this song. Hope you do.
Here’s ZZ Top performing “Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers” on their nineteen seventy-three album, “Tres Hombres.” I listened to this album a great deal during my junior and senior high school years, especially in art class.
Today’s song came out during a time when I navigated the usual issues with understanding myself, love and life during my teenage years.
The song was written by Toy Caldwell, a founding member of the band, and a person of passions. He passed away in nineteen ninety-three, forty-five years old, from cardio and respiratory problems associated with cocaine use. It’s his lead guitar on the song.
The song is, “Can’t You See,” by the Marshall Tucker Band. It came out in nineteen seventy-three, and it’s one of those songs that captures the despair you can feel over something you’re enduring. The song’s sentiments ends up capable of being applied to many moments of frustration and hopelessness. “Can’t you see what you’re doing to me?” “Can’t you see what this job is doing to me?”
To me, to you, to us, you can run through the gamut and come out on the other side with the same vows the song encapsulates. “Gonna find me a mountain, jump off, and nobody’s going to know.” You’ve been pushed to your end. Then, after the release of all these thoughts, you reach a binary moment: which way you going to go? Are you really going to get on a freight train and run away, or jump off a mountain, or you going to suck it up, endure the pain, and find another way to press on regardless?
Some end up lost somewhere in the middle, unwilling or unable to commit to either direction.
Accumulating steps and miles for my Fitbit in Ashland’s downtown yesterday, I heard a busker belting out an acoustic version of “Simple Man.” Remembering it from my high school years, I started singing along to myself. Lynyrd Skynyrd was part of the rising southern rock movement in the seventies, along with ZZ Top, the Charlie Daniels Band, and the Marshall Tucker Band.
The song, with its clear vocals and power guitars, reminded me of those years and a simpler period of life when my main concerns were getting gas money and passing tests in school. When the song stopped abruptly yesterday, I hunted the busker down in an unused business entrance on Main Street where he was changing a guitar string. We chatted a bit and I donated a few bucks to his cause.
The song, of course, hijacked my mental stream and stayed, so I pass it on to you. Here’s Lynyrd Skynyrd with “Simple Man,” from their first album in nineteen seventy-three.
Mom gave this album to me for a Christmas present in nineteen seventy-three, a gift made on my older sister’s recommendation.
I was ecstatic. I’d only heard and read a little about the album, ‘Quadraphenia,’ but I was an enormous Who fan at that point. Come on, they were fresh off ‘Tommy’ and ‘Who’s Next?,’ with the legendary, ‘Won’t Be Fooled Again.’ Their music spoke to a wannabe teenage rebel on the cusp of childhood’s end.
I played the bejesus out of this album, generally at a wall-shaking volume. This song, ‘The Real Me,’ was the opening track. While the song speaks to me with its lyrics and Daltry’s delivery, I’m enamored with Entwhistle’s flowing, active, dominating bass.
The cracks between the paving stones
Look like rivers of flowing veins
Strange people who know me
Peeping from behind every window pane
The girl I used to love
Lives in this yellow house
Yesterday she passed me by
She doesn’t want to know me now
I think it’s an appropriate song for the Internet age and the era of fake news. People hide behind anonymous posts and comments, putting forward false identities, deploying lies and false information to stoke fear and doubt, and further their causes.
‘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.
Michael Seidel, writer 