Tag: rock

Friday’s Theme Music

I awoke streaming this song, “Is It in My Head?”, in my head this morning (ha, ha).

I often wonder about the truths of perceptions, impressions, and memories. I don’t wonder about just mine, but how others came to their beliefs, and how difficult it can be to dislodge an idea after it’s burrowed into you. We’ve been exposed to evidence that the winners write history. History is often propaganda to justify and moralize decisions and sustain political or popular support. We all love heroes and myths.

So I wonder with myself about whether I remember something correctly, whether I’m too deeply embedded in silos and bubbles to perceive the truth and grasp it, and often, if I’m conning myself into hoping and believing that my writing efforts amount to anything. It’s a perpetual cycle of challenging, searching, and thinking.

Today’s song selection, made by my mind (and probably invited in by the latest rounds of dreams), “Is It in My Head” is from Quadrophenia by the Who. The album was released in 1973, when I became seventeen years old. I’d been searching and wondering well before I heard this song.

I continue searching and wondering today, almost fifty years later.

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Saturday’s Theme Music

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.

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

“And the love that I feel is so far away. I’m a bad dream that I just had today. And you shake your head and say, it’s a shame.”

Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick album was released in 1972. Sixteen years old, I bought it on vinyl and wore it out playing it. Listening to this concept album last night – concept albums were big in those years – it reminds me of some of the era’s Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer music — or they remind me of Jethro Tull. Like most art, it’s a continuum of exploration and imagining, building on what’s heard and done.

“But your wise men don’t know how it feels, to be thick as a brick.”

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

I like Pearl Jam, and I like this song, “Alive”. Although released in 1991 and categorized as grunge, it’s a hard-rocking song (with softer moments) like the rock I grew up with in the late sixties and early seventies.

Now, it’s classic rock.

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Thursday’s Theme Music

Alice Cooper came into my scene around 1969, when I was thirteen. Their Killer album, with its snake on a blood-red cover, was a favorite. From that album were “School’s Out” and “I’m Eighteen”. Those two songs were generally played a couple times a day at very loud volume for a few months after the album came out in 1971, but my favorite song on it was “Under My Wheels”.

Lyrics draw me, and did the same with this song. The delivery, backed by rising guitars and horns, becomes more frenetic and intense, which I thought was a reflection of some relationships. He wants one thing, she’s offering something else, and it’s all messed up.

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Thursday’s Theme Music

This is one of those songs that I asked of myself, “What the fuck are they singing?” when it was first released.

It came out in 1987, before the Internet became the familiar household pet it now is. That meant learning what was being sung wasn’t easy. I listened to the song and discussed it without others. Beer was involved. You’d think that with beer involved, a solution would be found, but nobody knew the words.

Hell, it’s no wonder, now that I can use the Intertubes to find the lyrics:

I cry wolf give her mouth to mouth
Like a movin’ heartbeat in the witchin’ hour
I’m runnin’ with the wind a shadow in the dusk
And like the drivin’ rain yeah like the restless rust
I never sleep

Hmmm? Yet the song works as FM rock fodder, delivering that need for a chorus, something that everyone understands and can sing with them:

I got ta feel it in my blood wo oh
I need your touch don’t need your love wo oh

And I want and I need
And I lust animal
And I want and I need
And I lust animal

n/t lyricsfreak.com

Electric guitars and lots of pounding drums and thumping bass go a long way to making the song memorable. It’s definitely modern rock.

 

 

 

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Today’s Theme Music

I woke up in a Foghat state of mind.

I’d had an exciting and interesting dream about a recent dream. Without disclosing more, it was tremendously uplifting, bolstering my self-confidence to scary levels. I will note that I dreamed about the number eight again, which makes, unofficially, but what I can remember and enumerate, seven times. I’m waiting to see if I’ll dream of eight an eight time to end the series.

Back to Foghat. Those of you of certain ages and inclination will remember this song. “I Just Want to Make Love to You” is a blues staple that’s been well-covered by some great artists. But I encountered Foghat’s version first. It was nineteen seventy-two, and I was sixteen, a wonderful combination. By then, I was enamored with rock and guitars. Foghat’s cover of this song opens with rocking guitars, and doesn’t let up. What else needs said?

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Today’s Theme Music

It’s a basic rock and roll, guitar-hero, hot as hell day. I employ hyperbole, of course. It’s not as hell today, but will be a toasty, sweat inducing, hyperbole-inspiring ninety-seven degrees on the beloved Fahrenheit scale.

Love this song. Stationed in Germany with the U.S. Air Force and watching the Soviets when the song hit the waves and created a stream source in my head, I always considered it a direct, mocking response to President George H.W. Bush’s inauguration. Here’s my reference:

We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler,
Machine gun hand
We got department stores
and toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes
for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people,
says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn,
got roads to drive.

h/t to azlyrics.com

Yes, values, priorities, and directions can get a little skewed in the free world. Here’s Neil Young from nineteen eighty-nine with “Rockin’ In the Free World.”

 

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Today’s Theme Music

The stream has shifted. Into the flow comes an all-time favorite by a little band called Derek and the Dominoes, with help from a guy named Duane Allman. Eric Clapton and Jim Gordon wrote the song, “Layla,” as a love ballad about Eric’s love for George Harrison’s wife, Patty Boyd. Duane entered the picture and changed the song to its more familiar rock sound.

Back in those days, I didn’t know about the confusion arising over the name of the group. I knew when I heard the song, I loved it and sought it out. I thought it was Eric Clapton playing, but if it was this guy, Derek, I didn’t care. Being a slow witted animal, I eventually grasped that it was Eric playing and singing, with help from the great Duane Allman – which explains the similarity to the Allman Brothers’ music of that period, right? It all eventually came together.

To me, this is a triumphant, feel-good song that ignites my creative energies. Pick up your air guitar. Time to jam.

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Today’s Theme Music

How about a little Dirty Mac today? Mitch Mitchell, John Lennon, Keith Richards (on bass!) and Eric Clapton, from The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, 1968, introduced by a young Mick Jagger. Oh, the hair, the youth, the beat, the playing!

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