Today’s song started streaming when I awoke and thought, “Ah, heart is still beating.” I was amusing myself, and not worried about health.
From that, though, came Huey Lewis and the News, and “The Heart of Rock & Roll” (1984). I’m not a fan of the band or the song, but one, I had friends who were (and presumably, still are) fans, and their songs proliferated on Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) FM stations when I was in Asia and Europe.
Now it’s stuck in my head. I’m passing it on to you. You can thank me when you see me. Cheers
Today’s theme music is from 1984, when Madonna was a new phenom.
I started streaming it because of a dream. In the dream, people were constantly chastising me for crossing the border, or crossing the lines, or crossing the borderlines. At first, I responded with confusion, telling them, I didn’t see, or, I didn’t know. Sometimes I apologized because they were upset. But as I grasped what they meant about borders and lines, I realized that they were the offensive ones with their false conformity-based or racially/sexually biased borders. As I encountered more people, I discovered more ridiculous borders and demands to recognize and accept the borders. That all pissed me off because their borders were predicated on childish fears and outlandish ideas. I was prompted to declare that I was against their borders, and I was going to cross them. That led to a huge, ugly, hostile confrontation.
So, awakening and thinking about the dream, I streamed a few things involving borders, like Taco Bell’s old commercial line, “Run for the border.” I then streamed a little CCR, “Better run through the jungle, and don’t look back to see.” But then, out of the morass came Madonna’s “Borderline”, which stayed and soothed.
Today’s theme music comes from the “What the hell was that?” file. It’s a general file in my head. The major category is “What the hell?” Besides the mystified “What the hell was that?” sub-category, there’s “What the hell did he/she just say?”, “What the hell did he/she just do?”, and the ever-popular, “What the hell was I going to do/get/say?”.
The song’s wild musical break began streaming in my mind this morning but I can’t identify a trigger. The song was released in 1966, but I began aware of it later, hearing it on my AM/FM alarm clock a few years later. So different, it immediately went into the “What the hell was that file?” It then took a few years to determine what it was, and hear it fully. Hearing if fully, the Yardbirds and Beach Boys inspirations become clear.
Judge for yourself. Here’s “Psychotic Reaction” by Count Five, in black and white.
“Forever in Blue Jeans” started splashing through my memory stream this morning. I’m not certain what called it in. My dreams didn’t feature blue jeans or Neil Diamond, so I don’t blame my dreams.
Thinking about the lyrics, I infer from them that blue jeans are okay. From that, and maybe I’m stretching, but blue jeans are the po’ people’s clothing.
If so, that’s from a completely different era, in my mind. Even by the time Neil and his guitarist wrote this song in the late seventies, blue jeans had moved up in income brackets. Way back around two thousand, I recall reading an article about wealthy folks having tailored blue jeans made for them. Although poor and lower classes still wear them, blue jeans are more about being hip and casual now.
Today’s song emerged from the dream stream. In this song, they say that they drive Cadillacs in their dreams. In my dream last night, I drove a Ferrari.
The song has a simplistic sound. I enjoy its harmonies, lyrics, and the sentiments that it delivers as a soft rebuke. When I hear this song, I often pause to soak it in.
One of the cats followed me around this morning because I hadn’t fed him yet. “Hungry, buddy?” I said. “Want some kibble? Anticipating brekkie?” Naturally, I started singing, “Anticipation, anticipation is making me late, is keeping me waiting.”
That made it today’s theme music. Here’s Carly Simon, “Anticipation”, 1971. Those were the good old days.
I didn’t recall when today’s theme music came out. I guessed about 1966, ’67. I was wrong. It was 1969. I remembered it the other day, when I was reading about Oregon’s marijuana glut a few days ago. Oregon has grown about one million pounds of surplus weed.
“Little Green Bag” by the George Baker Selection sounds weirdly like it’s from several different eras of pop-rock. Its beginning is often used to define cool in a movie or television show. A group moves in slow music, typically turning toward the camera as the music plays. This was done in Reservoir Dogs and the BBC television show, Red Dwarf. That song’s beginning, with its bass line and isolated percussion, is cool.
I always remembered the next lines, though, thinking, hey, he’s looking for a bag of grass, as in marijuana. It sounded like he dropped it and has gone back for it, except he wasn’t singing bag, he was singing back, like, greenback. Which, I realized in one history leson in school, was dollars. So he was looking for dollars, not grass. That amused me, but perplexed my friends, who didn’t know what the hell song I was singing.
I’d never seen the video before today. They look very uncomfortable to me, like they’re self-consciously cringing inside.
Discussing my dreams with the cats as I fed the coffee maker and overfloofs, we went out for the paper and agreed, yep, just another day.
Paul McCartney’s song, “Another Day” (1971), squirted into my stream. Milliseconds later, I’m singing, “It’s just another day. At the office where the papers grow, she takes a break,
drinks another coffee and she finds it hard to stay awake, do do do dit do do. It’s just another day.”
The song is an observation of a woman’s life as she cleans, dresses, and works. Under that melody and the surface word, as they sing, “So sad, sometimes she feels so sad,” is a sense of milieu ringing through other pop-rock songs of that era, is this it? Is this life? And accepting that, yes, this is life, people hunt escape. It’s just another day, over and over and over, going through motions while looking and hoping for some unspoken other thing.
Aretha Franklin’s death and the service held to honor her reminded me that I grew up in a privileged time and place. Pop, rock, soul, R&B, punk, psychedelic, rockabilly…these were just a few of the emerging sub-genres of music developing. Reaching audiences like me were aided by advances in the recording, duplicating, and broadcasting media. As people, we were forced in earlier eras to travel to bars, clubs, and other venues to enjoy performers’ offerings. Radio and television changed that, and the Internet has expanded that ability.
I was lucky. I had radios and television, food, a roof, decent schools, and relatively stable home life. I was lucky, too, because great producers, musicians, and entrepreneurs were bringing us the sounds. And I was lucky because there were people and groups like the Stones, the Who, the Supremes, CCR, Led, Santana, Aretha, Elvis, Stevie Wonder, the Jacksons and Osmonds, Eric Clapton, John Mayall…what a list could be made. But that’s what wikipedia is about.
I have my favorites. Guitar heroes and keyboard masters remain my weakness, but great voices and song-writers always turn my head, too. Or, give me a beat…yeah, you know.
Thinking of all that, and the riotous eternal summer that was my youth, I remembered Diana Ross & The Supremes. The catalog of their songs is stupendous, and their hits are cherished as classics of an era and the Motown Sound. Was it the end of the innocence, the beginning of the awakening, or the age of Aquarius?
Here is “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”, written by Ashford and Simpson, and recorded by many, but the cover streaming to me today is the one by “Diana Ross and the Supremes”. It’s powerful stuff to stream.
Michael Seidel, writer 