Streaming to you live through memories of recorded music heard in my youth, here is Supertramp with “Bloody Well Right.” Seems appropriate as we wrestle with rights and bloodshed.
You got a bloody right to say.
Today’s Theme Music
A memory stays with me.
The lights are low and the music is loud. I’m with friends at one of their houses, in my late teens, in the military, essentially, an adult now tasting the spectrum of responsibility by doing whatever I wanted because I was now an adult, and adults can do whatever they want, aslongaswedon’thurtanyonebreakanylawsrulesorregulationsandshowupforworkontime.
I was a responsible rebel.
So this song, “Fox On the Run,” is playing. Someone asks, “Who is this?” I answer, “Sweet.” We shout to be heard.
He looks at me and says, “Sweet what?”
“Sweet,” I answer.
“Sweet what?” he asks.
Catching that he doesn’t understand as others laugh, I say, “The group is called Sweet.”
“Oh,” he says. “I thought you were saying sweet.”
“I was.” That fired a neuron onto a axon. From it, I proclaim, “We’re all always seeking the sweet spot.”
That gains laughter. “You’re crazy,” others agree.
“Probably,” I agree.
Here is “Fox on the Run,” from nineteen seventy-four. It’s by Sweet.
Today’s Theme Music
Nineteen seventy-four: I had my license and a car. The car was a nineteen sixty-five Mercury Comet sedan. Forest green and an automatic, its two eighty-nine V-8 hustled me around the hills of southern West Virginia.
I graduated high school. My wife, who was then my girlfriend, was a year behind me, and had gone to Europe for a month. I was working odd jobs at the oil and gas distribution center when the Air Force recruiter called me. What the hell, I decided, and enlisted.
It was a shock to my girlfriend. It was a shock to everyone.
It wasn’t the greatest decision, an impulse because I was impatient to get out of there, to be free, to be my own person, impatience that still haunts me.
There’s no doubt what song represents that year best: ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’, by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. I used to sing it to my girlfriend, to entertain her.
Yes, we were in love.
Today’s Theme Music
I’m doing more streaming out of the Wayback Machine. This morning, we jump back to the year of my high school graduation, 1974.
Ah, exciting times. Vietnam. Nixon. Whip Inflation Now. Watergate. Cold War. ‘The Godfather’. ‘The Exorcist’. Eight track and cassette tapes. Princess phones, wall phones and extra-long telephone cords were in vogue.
Cable television viewership was rising. Microwaves were riding in on the first wave of availability. Companies were messing around with smaller computers but they were still focused on business. VCRs, DVDs, and Compact Discs were all in the future, as were Microsoft and Apple. There were still two Germanys. No European Union. Cell phones were just being used for the first calls but they were huge, expensive, heavy clunkers.
We were still recovering from the oil crisis of 1973. The national fifty-five miles per hour speed limit was upon us. The Phantom F-4 was our front line fighter, along with the F-111. The F-16 was still a prototype, and the F-14 was just entering service, with the F-15 coming along behind it. The Expos still played in Montreal, the Nationals didn’t play in Washington, and the Rockies and Marlins were still dreams.
From that stew, we have the Troggs with ‘Wild Thing’. I loved the song’s use in the film, ‘Major League’, in 1989. Charlie Sheen played Ricky ‘Wild Thing’ Vaughn, a Cleveland Indians pitcher. Of course, the Troggs hit was a cover of a song written, recorded and released in 1965 and the song in the movie was a cover by X.
So, here we go, a 1965 song, 1974 hit, from a 1989 movie, in which it was covered by a punk band, enjoyed in 2017.
Isn’t technology grand?
Michael Seidel, writer 