Tag: rock

Wednesday’s Theme Music

I thought my cats were singing today’s theme music. As I did the morning rituals of feeding cats, dressing, and foraging for coffee, they took turns stalking me, rubbing against my legs, sitting on my feet, giving me adoring gazes, and purring like mad. They wouldn’t relent, and I picked up that they were singing, “I got my mind set on you.”

You might recall the 1987 George Harrison cover of the 1962 song, “I’ve Got My Mind Set on You,” released by Harrison as “Got My Mind Set on You”, or the Weird Al parody, “(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long”. According to the feline streams hitting my music stream (a wholly telepathic thing), the cats were singing the Harrison cover.

I’ll go with it, just to purge it from my stream.

 

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

Today’s music popped into the stream out of my dreams. An old favorite from 1969 by the Who, the song came out when I was thirteen. I was singing it to myself when I went into science class. Melissa, the girl behind me, said, “Do you like the Who?” Sure, yes, etc. Melissa invited me over to her house to listen to music.

Here’s “Pinball Wizard”. The song and memory all seem innocuous now, but it was a big deal when I was thirteen.

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Monday’s Theme Music

I have stones on my mind today. Probably will for for several more days to weeks. Hard to say with kidney stones.

With those as my guide and inspiration from another blogger, Kenneth, I started streaming some Bob Dylan this morning. Of course, it’s the 1965 classic, “Like A Rolling Stone”. It felt like it took years to understand the lyrics, but as a kid, I always liked the intonation of, “Like a rolling stone.”

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Sunday’s Theme Music

Runnin’ behind today. Awoken with a sharp abdominal pain at 6:30. After a bathroom visit, “To the Google,” I cried. I’d begun to guess that I was attempting to pass a kidney stone.

The Googles agreed with me.

I did some home remedies that I was sure would work because they were on the ‘net. Three hours later, that was done, but I was a bit worn out, so I read and went to bed.

Back up at eleven, my stream fed me this Night Ranger tune, “When You Close Your Eyes” (1983), proving that you can still rock in the free mind.

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Saturday’s Theme Music

I was on the road today. Naturally, that opened my music stream to road songs. One of them that popped up early is by Canned Heat. AM Radio and the growing pop revolution introduced them to me in my early teens. I didn’t appreciate how much the blues inspired them until about six years later, when I was listening to ZZ Top and the Allman Brothers Band.

Besides Canned Heat, I was singing “Hit the Road, Jack,” “Truckin'”, “Little Red Corvette”, “American Pie”, “Little GTO”, “Beep Beep”, “Uneasy Rider”, “The Way”, “Sweet Hitchhiker”, “Life Is A Highway”, “One Headlight”, “Drive My Car”, “Mustang Sally”, “Little Deuce Coupe”, “Pink Cadillac”, “The Leader of the Pack”, “Dead Man’s Curve”, “On the Road Again”, “Where the Streets Have No Name”, “Route 66”, “Born to Be Wild”, “Ninety-nine Miles From LA”, “Midnight Rider”, “Fast Car”, “Runnin’ Down A Dream”, and “Radar Love”. You can place the performers to the songs.

You have any favorite road songs that I should have been streaming? I’d like to know them. Sharing is caring, friends.

Here’s Canned Heat with “On the Road Again” from 1968.

 

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Friday’s Theme Music

The cats inspired today’s theme music. I’d gotten out of bed and came into the office. From the other room came the sounds of a clumsy cat in the kitty litter box. A few moments later, a stink cyclone struck me.

As I hastened to attend the natural disaster, I told the cat (who wanted out, and I understand why), “I love you but sometimes love stinks.”

J. Geils Band, “Love Stinks”, 1980.

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Thursday’s Theme Music

Today’s song is one I sing briefly for myself almost every morning because I’ve tortured the lyrics to address my morning coffee ritual.

“Pour some coffee for me.

“Make it black, hot and strong,

“I can drink it all day long.”

Here’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me”, Def Leppard, 1987.

 

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

 

Songs often connect me to another place and time. In today’s case, I was connected to another person’s connection to elsewhere.

She was on my team at a San Mateo start-up. I’d moved to Oregon by now but went down to meet with my team once a month. We’d become good friends by then. First, she’d worked for my wife at an advertising agency. When a resource action moved them to the unemployment rosters, I hired her for a temp position and then ended up asking her to join my team. We carpooled for a while, too, and appreciated one another’s humor.

I had a radio in my office, the same boom box that was bought for office use in Germany a decade before, the same one I use now when I’m doing yard work. Back visiting my team in 2006, she was sitting in my office when they played The Killers, “When You Were Young”.

She said, “Oh, can you turn that up?”

Sure. I did.

Her expression acquired that almost reverential introspective gaze that people sometimes gain when they’re privately reminiscing. We started talking about the song. She told me that it reminded her of a friend. This is had happened about ten years before. She’d met this great guy, they got married, and then he cheated on her. Her friend became severely depressed and was going to kill herself but he found her and stopped it. They ended up going to counseling. Unlike the song, though, he cheated again. That was it for her. She didn’t kill herself, but she did divorced his ass.

So I remember her remembering this song as she remembers her friend.

I watched the video later to get a better understanding of what the song was about. It’s a long video, and they take their time getting into the music.

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

Memories come like tides, in private cycles. In today, I cycled back to Feb, 1991. I’d just come back from an assignment with the USAF in Germany. Enroute to California, I passed through WV and Pennsylvania on leave, visiting family, and then arrived at SF, CA.

Rain was pouring in the Bay Area that day. Ted, my sponsor, picked me up at the airport. California had been in a drought, he said, hard to believe since the great deluge was making Highway 101’s traffic a slow-moving shit show.

A little later, I was in the military hotel at Moffett just outside of Mountain View. Up the road was my new assignment, a place called Sunnyvale Air Station, a.k.a., the Blue Cube. The name was changed to Onizuka Air Base to honor Ellison Onizuka, an astronaut killed in the Challenger disaster.

Onizuka turned out to be a good assignment and my last. I retired there four and a half years later. The base closed down in 2010 and the Blue Cube was demolished in 2014. I blamed myself because the base probably wasn’t the same after my tenure (ha, ha).

It was a complete unknown to me when I arrived, though. Bored and tired, I flipped through channels in my hotel room, rediscovering American pop culture after four years in Germany, and saw a video by R.E.M. called “Losing My Religion”.

Somehow, it fit the moment.

 

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Monday’s Theme Music

I’d not thought of this song – or heard it – in a while, but Kalliope mentioned it on another post, and naturally the song was sucked into the stream.

Here’s Vanessa Carlton with “A Thousand Miles” (2002), a good song to begin a week, and an excellent song to stream as you walk-about and wonder.

Weirdly, it always bothers me that she doesn’t cover the piano up when she’d done with the song and has gone back home in the video. I think it’s a statement, things are not finished, but my inner tidy guy thinks, it was covered when you started, you should cover it when you’re done.

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