Tag: 1979

Sunday’s Theme Music

Raucous dreams consumed the night. Oh, yes, there was too a floof fight.

4:30 AM. In this corner, wearing long black and white fur and weighing in at sixteen pounds…Tucker.

In the other corner, by the kibble bowl, that eleven pound ginger blade who used to be called Meep!…Papi.

I know Tucker started it because it’s always Tucker. Little combat was involved because Papi is a shrieker. His first one bought us awake and out of bed in one leap, and it was done. I swear that we moved like ninjas…little aging, graying ninjas…

But it’s email that gives me today’s theme music. Money…financing…sales ending today…the calls for assistance and donations and contributions dominated the box in a depressing blitz. Pelosi claimed her email wasn’t about money but Biden openly asked. Amazon and Costco crowed, look at what everyone is buying. Animal shelters and rescue groups wanted cash. The USPS needs help…

Such an AM gut punch even before my brekkie and coffee. Making them was when the theme song came: “Money (That’s What I Want)“.

The Beatles had a big hit with it, but I was channeling The Flying Lizards’ 1979 cover with Deborah Evans-Stickland. The Beatles were nakedly raw and emotional in their money demands. The Flying Lizards brought a mocking, flat monotone to their appeal.

My email solicitations were across the gamut: fear — they’re winning, they’re winning, give me money to fight back — to logic — no, it was all fear, fear of what will happen if you don’t give or buy, because you will be losing.

Anyway, that’s my music choice for today. Please listen and send me money. And stay healthy. Wear a damn mask.

The end?

 

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

Today’s theme music came after reviewing my dreams. Empowering dreams, I enjoyed them, in part because they seemed fuller and more coherent than the last few sleeps’ fragile fragments. As I thought about them and the almost one eighty shift in lucidity, I thought, the dream police must’ve stepped in, which gave me a chuckle.

Like that, the brain said, “Oh, “The Dream Police” by Cheap Trick,” and began playing it like it was Alexa gone nuts.

So, I went with it. 1979: a good year to be young and getting older. Amusing video. I don’t think I’ve heard this song in a looonnnggg time.

 

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Thursday’s Theme Music

Today’s song is actually the cats’ theme music. As I’m reduced to staying at home (see: novel coronavirus news), the cats have employed a shadowing technique. Wherever I’m at, here they come. That brought to my mind (and I’m sure it’s already in the cats’ minds), Blondie’s song – “One Way Or Another” (1979) – about stalking.

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Saturday’s Theme Music

Planning the day, thinking about doin’ a little drivin’, I thought of Sniff n’ the Tears.

Don’t know much about this band. I could look them up, but I didn’t. I remember listening to the radio somewhere on a Texas Interstate, coming back from Austin (we lived in on Randolph Air Force Base, just outside of San Antonio) and hearing this song, “Drivers’s Seat” on the radio. And the announcer – it was the weekly countdown – said, “That was Sniff n’ the Tears moving up in the countdown.” My friends and I, hearing that band’s name, started laughing, and then we were coming up with other band names.

Anyway, the song mentions being doin’ a little drivin’ on a Saturday, which I’ll be doing. I’m sure many others will be out there. As they used to say on Hill Street Blues, “Let’s be careful out there.”

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Friday’s Theme Music

Yeah, another song that seems like a remnant from the dreamscape that’s slipped through the filters between the worlds and ended up in the stream of my consciousness.

“Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin'” by Journey has an entertaining hard-rock bluesiness to it, delivered by the beat and that piano playing. The lyrics are based on a true story experienced by Steve Perry, according to memory, which claims it heard that factoid on American Top 40 whilst stationed at Randolph AFB, Texas in 1979. Drove a lovely Pontiac Firebird then, which we’d just purchased new. I was back in the military after a year’s break. Owned a restaurant and attended college during that break, but that’s another story.  Big news of that year is that the Shah of Iran, the end of the Iranian Monarchy, and the Iranian hostage crises. Jimmy Carter was POTUS. Remember any of that? Seems like a million years ago.

As for the dream? Ah, that’s another tale. It needs thought about more to be writ about.

Like Steve Perry’s leather pants?

 

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Sunday’s Theme Music

This song, “Goodbye Stranger”, arrived in the stream after watching people at the coffee shop and on the streets, and inadvertently eavesdropping (they speak, I have ears…it happens).

A woman regularly brings her dog into the coffee shop. She usually sits back by the community table, where I like to work when I can. Her dog is often a cause for conversations with others. So I’ve learned that her dog is a rescue from an animal hoarding situation, that she’s had to work with him, that his name is Atlas, that he does much better now, but that other dogs’ barking makes him nervous, that he is her service dog. I’ve learned others had dogs like him, or saved from similar situations. He’s often compared to a Ridgeback but he isn’t one, not a true Ridgeback, she says.

But I’ve never heard her name, or why she needs a service dog, nor why she is bald. She wears dark glasses, but she watches people, back from her space by the wall, with her service dog beside her…

I’ve decided that I don’t want coffee shop friendships. I’m there to work. Cruel of me, innit? So I keep myself to myself, but as I leave each time, I feel her eyes watch me, and imagine I turn my head and say, “Goodbye, stranger.”

But I don’t. It has caused the 1979 Supertramp song to find itself in my stream.

 

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Friday’s Theme Song

Walking in the cold, cloudy day yesterday, I thought of sunshine. I believed that I’d been promised some sunshine. Had I missed it?

The drizzle had stepped and the fog slipped off its coat, but low clouds still obscured our landscape. It offered its own beauty but it fell short when you’ve been promised sunshine. Tomorrow, I thought.

Meanwhile, my mind walked through sunshine songs. Katrinn and the Waves, Bill Withers, Cream, the Beatles, the Doors, Weezer, Soundgarden, and the Kinks all offered something, along with the Violent Femmes, Fifth Dimension, and Lovin’ Spoonful. Nothing caught the day’s mood.

Today, I came out and opened the blinds to sunshine. Yes, my heart sang. Before the first chorus ended, a mean, snickering cloud slipped over the sun and blotted out its efforts. No fair, my heart cried.

Songs about heart (and by Heart) poured into the stream, but Pat Benatar ruled with “Heartbreaker” (1979) took over.

Two sets of lines dominated from “Heartbreaker”. The first is that angry and defiant, “No, no, no!” Yes, there was today, no accepting. Second is the classic set, “You’re a heartbreaker, dream maker, love taker, don’t you mess around with me.” Plus, there’s all that thundering, driving guitar, crisp drums, and Benatar’s voice.

Yes, it’s the theme for today. As a bonus, Pat and her band have some nascent 1980s big hair on display. Gotta love it.

 

 

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

For some reason, my mind pivoted through several holiday songs this morning. Then one — by the Scorpions, of course — what other group leaps to mind when you think holiday, right? — lodged in the stream.

It wasn’t so much as the holiday as it was the cold friggin’ air, air that felt it belonged up in Alaska, where a friend mentioned that it was twelve degrees. We weren’t nearly that low, hovering at just under 30 F, with clear skies and sunshine, but that sun was all light and no heat, ya know?

That’s where the Scorpions wiggled into the stream.

Let me take you far away
You’d like a holiday
Let me take you far away
You’d like a holiday
Exchange the cold days for the sun
A good time and fun

h/t Metrolyrics.com

So you see how it all worked out – holiday, cold, sun, heat, Scorpions, going away?

I thought you would. Cheers

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Friday’s Theme Music

Today’s music comes straight out of Facebook. A friend mentioned it was Meat Loaf’s 72nd natal day, and linked to some of Meat Loaf’s music. “Bat Out of Hell” (1979) leaped into my mental stream. It’s a sort of bombastic, over-the-top progressive rock song, just the sort that sucks me in and rocks me back, a good theme song for this first November day of 2019. I don’t think it got any chart action in the U.S., but who cares?

 

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Friday’s Theme Music

You know, some days you get up feeling really good, and then you read the news or hear some crappy info being spewed from somewhere, something that makes you feel like the Earth is opening up and sucking  you down. This song is for those moments: “Don’t Bring Me Down” by ELO (1979). Some days, you gotta fight back.

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