Tag: 1985

Thursday’s Theme Music

Aretha Franklin is a treasure, a galvanizing, energetic vocalist. She brings it, baby.

Her song, “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?” has been zooming through my streams of being today. I like this song’s sly lyrics, and the implications that someone else thinks they’re in control, but their game is exposed, and they’re the ones being played.

The music has that techno-disco vibe that I don’t really enjoy, but I like Aretha’s voice and delivery. I also enjoyed the song, “Freeway of Love” from the same album.

But “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?” is the one stuck in my head this morning, so here it is.

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

Ah, these words:

And she was lying in the grass
And she could hear the highway breathing
And she could see a nearby factory
She’s making sure she is not dreaming
See the lights of a neighbor’s house
Now she’s starting to rise
Take a minute to concentrate
And she opens up her eyes

The world was moving and she was right there with it (and she was)
The world was moving she was floating above it (and she was) and she was

h/t Azlyrics.com

I find this song, “And She Was” by the Talking Heads to be jubilant and affirming, a terrific song to lift your spirit higher as you’re navigating the day’s whims. Play it loud and sing along. It’s great for dancing, too.

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Saturday’s Theme Music

It’s a Stevie Ray Vaughn Saturday. He’s one of those performers that I can say, I’ve never heard something that he performed that I didn’t like. His heart and soul were heard in his sound, no matter the venue or song. No matter what he performed, it seemed so electric and amazing, it seemed like he channeled a higher power.

Here’s SRV and Double Trouble with “Cold Shot”, live, 1985.

 

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

In 1985, I was reassigned from Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Japan, to Shaw AFB in South Carolina. Part of a mobility unit, my primary mission was to deploy to southwest Asia and exercise command and control of deployed Air Force units. Since we didn’t do that often (other than field exercises), my secondary mission of training Air Force reservists in southwest Asia command and control took center stage. I was on the road a lot. My commander let us drive our cars to many locations. That meant I listened to a lot of music in my car.

One of my favorite albums of that time was No Jacket Required by another Genesis member, Phil Collins. That was a terrific album. While I favored several songs on it, “Sussudio” edges out “Take Me Home” and is the song I’m streaming through my head today.

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Monday’s Theme Music

I heard “Abacab” by Genesis on the radio yesterday. It’s unusual to hear it on the radio.

The song is sort of hypnotic in its sounds and words, but not very deep. Because it’s hypnotic and I’m simple prey for these things, it hung around in my head’s stream for the rest of the day and was still there this morning. But thinking about “Abacab” and Genesis, I started thinking about Mike +The Mechanics, and their music. Mike is Mike Rutherford of Genesis, and their albums and performances were side projects to his Genesis existence.

Mike +the Mechanics’ music isn’t very deep, either, but fit well on the radio stations of the time. “Silent Running,” with its chorus of “Can you hear me?”, was their first hit, so I thought I’d go with that.

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Friday’s Theme Music

So, confession, again. I enjoy the original Mad Max trilogy. The first is the least of them, but I will watch The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome again and again without too much thought.

Which is what I did this week. Thunderdome ends with Tina Turner singing “We Don’t Need Another Hero.” Which makes sense in that context; they’ve already lost it all. Civilization has been wiped out, and they’re trying to rebuild something out of the wreckage, something more humane than Bartertown and the Thunderdome.

But I wake up and read the news, and think, we need a hero. Seems like any fucking day, someone is going to decide, “Today is a nice day to nuke! Let’s find someone and make a radioactive statement.” Then a shit storm of retaliation will fire up. Anarchy and chaos get stirred in as civilization’s plastic veneer melts, and norms, morals, and ethics get tossed.

(As an ironic aside, I first saw The Road Warrior on VHS while I was on temporary duty with the Air Force in South Korea.)

Yeah, gloomy fucking Friday, right? Not really. A hero can stop all that. I don’t see anyone riding in at the moment, but I’m always an optimistic person that eventually sanity prevails.

So listen to Tina singing in 1985, and think about it. Focus on the song’s words, “Looking for something we can rely on, there’s got to be something better out there.”

Yes, there’s got to be.

 

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Sunday’s Theme Music

Today’s song is from the movie, “St. Elmo’s Fire.” The song is, “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)”.

I’ve never seen the entire film. It didn’t grab me. I found it vague, with problems manufactured by unthinking, vapid, self-absorbed characters. Perhaps I should have given it a greater viewing.

I knew the song mostly because of FM Stereo. It came out in nineteen eighty-five. I was doing a lot of traveling, then, putting over forty-thousand miles on my car during the year. So I heard it a lot. I didn’t think much of the song, but it’s stuck in my head, so I present it to you.

Cheers

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Thursday’s Theme Music

Today’s theme music is a courtesy of Don Henley and Mike Campbell. The song is, “The Boys of Summer.”

This song, with lyrics like, “I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac,” about looking back and change, and coping with it. I’m a person that looks back a great deal. I’m not obsessed with it, but looking back helps me re-imagine where I’m going. It’s one of those arrows of time. Looking back helps me keep straight.

A little voice inside my head said, “Don’t look back. You can never look back.”
I thought I knew what love was,
What did I know?
Those days are gone forever,
I should just let them go, but-

Today’s technology encourages looking back. I can watch movies that star actors that died, leading me to wonder, are they still alive? I can check a friend’s post, even though he died a few years ago, and replay movies, television shows, and interviews from the past, and pretend that past is today, or yesterday, although it was created decades ago.

It’s nostalgia, isn’t it? It is for me. Television, pop and rock music, and movies were part of my scenes as I grew up. Songs come on and take me back to a happier moment, as do smells, and touches. I like going back there; I like feeling happy.

There are fewer happier moments today. Experiences temper my expectations, and I’ve become jaded.  It could be from looking back, or simply being cursed with too much ability to recall times and events. It’s part of who I am, so I don’t decry it.

Well, maybe I decry it a little, because that’s who I am, as well.

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Saturday’s Theme Music

Bob Mustin commented on yesterday’s theme music. He wrote, “The song favored by my class at the Naval Academy was The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.””

I hear that. His comment summoned a memory. We were in Egypt in nineteen eighty-five as part of Exercise Bright Star. It was July, or maybe August. Living in a tent city in the desert, the ops portion was done. We were awaiting redeployment. There was a lot of down time. While enduring the Sahara heat in our tent’s shade, one of the guys played “Green, Green Grass of Home” on a small cassette player.

One of the other guys said, “Man, turn that off. It’s depressing.”

The player said, “I think it’s nice.”

“It’s about a guy in prison,” one person said.

“Nice,” someone said. “It’s not nice. Makes me remember my wife is suing me for divorce.”

“Yeah, and it makes me remember my home when I was growing up,” the first speaker said. “There wasn’t any green, green grass at our house. It was all cement and asphalt, even the playground. The ball field wasn’t paved, but it didn’t have no grass, either.”

“Yeah, and my folks are dead,” said another guy. “There’s no one going to be there to meet me when I get home.”

An argument arose about the song and its meanings.

Ah, sweet memories. We heard the Tom Jones cover in Egypt, so that’s what I’m playing for you.

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Today’s Theme Music

An old fave. From an excellent album and nineteen eighty-five, here’s Annie Lennox and the Eurythmics with, “Would I Lie to You?”

I’d come back from Okinawa the year this was released, and was assigned to a mobility unit. We traveled a lot, mostly to Florida, but also Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, and Europe. I’d bought a new Mazda RX-7, and put over fifty thousand miles on it driving to temporary duty locations. The net result of that traveling, I’ve never seen this video until today. It’s, ah, interesting, with the story it told.

Side note: nineteen eighty-five was the year of my first computer. It used CP/M 86, had a tiny green screen, dual floppies, and ran at 4.77 MHz, but it was something. Using WordStar, I’d put it to learn how to write fiction, but mostly, I gamed on it.

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