Tag: The Who

Tuesday’s Theme Music

New Year. Don’t know about you, but on a personal quantum level, I feel good about it. Feel like I’m in tune.

Which is a nice segue for today’s music. Here’s Daltry and the Who with the Pete Townsend composition, “Getting In Tune,” from 1971, as fine a year as there is. The song starts soft and then rises and quickens, a perfect metaphor for 2018.

 

 

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Friday’s Theme Music

You ever look yourself in the mirror, and ask yourself, “Who are you?” Or think you know someone, and then they do something that disgusts you, so you end up asking the same question, “Who are you?”

Yeah, “Who Are You?” By The Who. Nineteen seventy-eight. Sadly, I associated this song with Keith Moon and his death, as the drummer died a month or two after this song was released. Watch him drumming in this video. What expressions, a one hundred-eighty degree difference from Entwhistle on bass, smoking cigarettes but not showing much on his face. Sometimes, it looks like Entwhistle is secretly amused.

This is also when I turned down a promotion in the Air Force, separated from it, and headed home, where I attempted to be a restaurant owner and a college student. The restaurant didn’t work out, and I went back into the military a year later. So, this is a good anthem for that era of my life, as I tried figuring out who I am.

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Today’s Theme Music

Mom gave this album to me for a Christmas present in nineteen seventy-three, a gift made on my older sister’s recommendation.

I was ecstatic. I’d only heard and read a little about the album, ‘Quadraphenia,’ but I was an enormous Who fan at that point. Come on, they were fresh off ‘Tommy’ and ‘Who’s Next?,’ with the legendary, ‘Won’t Be Fooled Again.’ Their music spoke to a wannabe teenage rebel on the cusp of childhood’s end.

I played the bejesus out of this album, generally at a wall-shaking volume. This song, ‘The Real Me,’ was the opening track. While the song speaks to me with its lyrics and Daltry’s delivery, I’m enamored with Entwhistle’s flowing, active, dominating bass.

The cracks between the paving stones
Look like rivers of flowing veins
Strange people who know me
Peeping from behind every window pane
The girl I used to love
Lives in this yellow house
Yesterday she passed me by
She doesn’t want to know me now

h/t to Metrolyrics.com

I think it’s an appropriate song for the Internet age and the era of fake news. People hide behind anonymous posts and comments, putting forward false identities, deploying lies and false information to stoke fear and doubt, and further their causes.

Can you see the real me?

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Today’s Theme Music

When a man is running from his boss
Who hold a gun that fires “cost”
And people die from being cold
Or left alone because they’re old
And bombs are dropped on fighting cats
And children’s dreams are run with rats
If you complain you disappear
Just like the lesbians and queers
No one can love without the grace
Of some unseen and distant face
And you get beaten up by blacks
Who though they worked still got the sack
And when your soul tells you to hide
Your very right to die denied
And in the battle on the streets
You fight computers and receipts
And when a man is trying to change
But only causes further pain
You realize that all along
Something in us going wrong…

You stop dancing.

Many of us contemplate our lives and wonder, will it ever become better? W’re always trying to define what ‘it’ is – equal rights, fairer pay, less war, less poverty, less starvation and disease. As we watch the political firestorm intensify in the United States and other countries, we wonder, how did we arrive at this moment. It’s educational to look back on songs like the above. These battles have been going on for as long as humanity.
Progress is being made. It used to be that such problems and challenges were accepted as ‘that’s the way it is’ or not acknowledged as issues. It used to be that some humans could hold other humans as slaves and decree their fate. Women were held as inferior. So were people who weren’t like us, whether it was by religion, skin color, sexual orientation, or their ethnicity or cultural heritage. We are moving on to equal rights and better lives for all, but it’s a shift as slow as the Earth’s tectonic plates.
‘Helpless Dancer’ is a song by The Who. It was included on ‘Quadraphenia’, an album that was released in October, 1973. Speaking to my teenage angst and frustration and laden with drums, guitars and angry lyrics, it became one of my it albums, alongside ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ by Pink Floyd.
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