Tag: 1997

Sunday’s Theme Music

Yesterday’s late afternoon was spent at Lake-of-the-Woods Resort. We’d been planning to go to LOW for a couple weeks. A favorite local band, Colonel Mustard, was playing, and friends have a cabin and boat there. We’d do a boat ride, have dinner, listen to music and dance. As a bonus, the air was much clearer in that area, so we’d give our respiratory systems a break, too.

We had a fun time. Colonel Mustard closed with Chumpawamba’s song, “Tubthumbing.” Most people know the part of the song that goes, “I get knocked down, but I get up again, ain’t never gonna keep me down.”

That’s how life goes for most of us. We’re hit with something that floors us. Getting up, we stagger forward, only to get hit again. Each time we’re hit, it’s a little harder to get up, but we usually grit out teeth and declare, “I’m not staying down.”

Suits my mood, so WTF? Here we are, from 1997.

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Friday’s Theme Music

Let’s pop back to 1997.

The scene is San Jose, California. The group is Smash Mouth. They were the summer’s rising flavor. One song that caught on was a little ditty called “Walkin on the Sun”.

It ain’t no joke I’d like to buy the world a toke
And teach the world to sing in perfect harmony
And teach the world to snuff the fires and the liars
Hey I know it’s just a song but it’s spice for the recipe
This is a love attack I know it went out but it’s back.
It’s just like any fad it retracts before impact
And just like fashion it’s a passion for the with it and hip
If you got the goods they’ll come and buy it just to stay in the clique

h/t to azlyrics.com

It’s just a song, but it something to help you think. Cheers

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Sunday’s Theme Music

I’d forgotten the Indigo Girls until I saw a Tig Notaro comedy special on Netflix last night. When I thought about forgetting IG, I realized that I don’t hear them on any of the many FM and Sirius XM stations and channels that I listen to. I guess I’m not the only one that forget them. Yet I love the energetic, infectious style that they deliver.

“Shame On You” from 1997 is one of my Indigo Girls favorites. I hope you listen and enjoy.

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

It’s been twenty years since this was recorded in concert, spit in the cosmic wind as far as time goes, but a chunk of living for humans on Eath. These humans are renown for their musical performances. These humans are David Bowie, with the Foo Fighters. These humans were performing this song, “Hallo, Spaceboy,” at Madison Square Garden in New York to celebrate Bowie’s fiftieth birthday.

Fun to watch. There will be drumming’.

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Today’s Theme Music

I find myself singing a song, and then consider when I heard it, and where I was when it was released. With this song today, I thought, oh, when did this come out? I was living in Mountain View, California, wasn’t I? But that means the late nineties.

That couldn’t be right, but I look it up, and confirm, yes, this song is twenty years old.

No way, I react. It seems so recent and fresh. But it says it on the net, on Wikipedia, so you know it’s true.

Songs, politics, and technology are my time markers. When this song came out in nineteen ninety-seven, my email account was on Hotmail. My computer was a Zenith. I’d graduated to a monster VGA monitor. My hard drive was twenty meg, and I had both three and a half inch and five and a quarter inch floppy drives, along with a R/W CD drive. I think we were running about twenty-five MHz, and Windows 3.1. Bill Clinton was the POTUS, and the economy was flying. As an aside, Must See TV, with Friends and Seinfeld, filled the top ten television shows.

The U.S.S.R. had collapsed, and the Berlin Wall had come down. There was talk about the Peace Dividend. We thought there was a glorious future ahead of us.

Twenty years. As everyone finds out, significant changes take place in twenty years.

Here is Sugar Ray, with “Fly.”

 

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Today’s Theme Music

The music today is a product of a triple coincidence. There could be some causality, but it might just be linkage.

I’ve been streaming the song, “I Will Buy You A New Life.” It’s part of my mental shuffle set. I like the lyrics, and often sing or hum it to myself as I meander through activities. Everclear members wrote the song, and the band released it back in nineteen ninety-seven, a year that puts thoughts in pause to reflect on how much time has sneezed by since that song came out. Everclear had a number of terrific albums with fab songs like “Santa Monica”, and “Father of Mine,” but it’s amazing it’s been twenty years since I was driving around Half Moon Bay listening to them, dude.

Please, join me and observe a moment of silence for nineteen ninety-seven.

Zoning back into this post, the three coincidences that lands the song in the august position (get it?) as today’s theme music is one, I was singing it several times this week; two, Everclear headlined at the Jackson County Fair last month; and tres, I read that Everclear, from Portland, Oregon, is the state’s highest grossing musical act ever. With that power of three pushing the nomination, victory was assured.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

Woke up feeling like some Squirrel Nut Zippers.

I began listening to them in nineteen ninety-seven. I was working for a medical defice startup called P.A.S. in Palo Alto. A young co-worker introduced me to the S.N.Z. sound with the second album, “Hot.”

I became particularly fond of “Hell.” It was a good song to sing along to while seat dancing  when I was stuck in the SF Bay Area traffic. I still smile when I hear this song.

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Today’s Theme Music

Paranoia, paranoia
Everybody’s comin’ to get me
Just say you never met me
I’m runnin’ underground with the moles
Diggin’ in holes

Hear the voices in my head
I swear to God it sounds like they’re snoring
But if you’re bored then you’re boring
The agony and the irony, they’re killing me

I’m not sick, but I’m not well
And I’m so hot, ’cause I’m in hell
I’m not sick, but I’m not well
And it’s a sin to live this well
(One, two, three, four)

(h/t to songlyrics.com)

Yes, that’s a couple choruses outta ‘Flagpole Sitta’, Harvey Danger, nineteen ninety-seven. Living in Mountain View, California, I worked for a medical device in Palo Alto. This song just knocked me out. Lyrics, beat, pace, it all worked for me. It became a “crank up” tune, one of those that causes my hand to gravitate to volume control.

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Today’s Theme Music

Sublime was on the scene briefly. A ska-punk band, I had only one of their albums. One of their hits was ‘Santeria’, in nineteen ninety-seven. My first question was, what is Santeria? Fortunately, Sarah and Vinnie on Alice (KLLC) answered that question for me as I was driving to work and on errands in the SF Bay Area. Sarah and Vinnie were great company in the early morning. I drifted the dial for the rest of the day, a funny way to express pressing on buttons to find a new station.

I enjoyed living in the SF Bay Area. Lots to do, great places eat and shop, wonderful book stores, and lots of concerts. The weather was usually fabulous for about two thirds of the year. Work and traffic consumed most of our time, yet it was all good.

Of course, by the time I learned of Sublime, Bradley Nowell, the lead singer and guitarist, was already dead of a heroin overdose. What intrigued me about ‘Santeria’, besides that word, was the general tone of the lyrics against the easy-going melody. Here is this guy, upset that he’d lost his girlfriend, which he was calling a heina. He was calling the guy he’d lost her to, ‘sancho’, and wanted to shoot and kill sancho for revenge. None of it was forced and seemed authentic and true. Learning of Nowell’s death and the  band’s success after Nowell’s death was another layer for reflection while waiting for a green light and listening to the song.

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Today’s Theme Music

The end of the last century went well for me. Retiring from the military, I was living in the Bay area and was able to catch fire a start-up. I worked with diligent, capable people. We had fun and the future was exciting. U.S. Surgical and then Tyco bought us, and everything changed. We made money but it was a lot less fun.

Into this came a group with an unusual sound called ‘Smash Mouth’. They eventually had a few more hits and became well known for providing the theme music to ‘The Big Bang Theory’ on CBS, and for songs in the ‘Shrek’ franchise. Back in 1997, though, we knew them for ‘Walking on the Sun,’ with its cynical reflections on the hippie revolution, pop culture, advertising, and our future state of affairs.

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