Michael Hutchence of INXS was singing “This what you need, I’ll give you what you need,” in my head. It’s out of their 1986 song, “What You Need”.
I was whispering it to myself as coffee brewed and filled the cup with potential, singing its aroma to my nose. This paints sort of a desperate and tragic portrait of me, maybe, a coffee junket hovering over the brewing process, stalking that first hit — I mean, sip.
I enjoy the song, “What You Need”, and its eclectic blend of funky riffs, guitar rock, dance beat, and rising sax. It’s a song that always lifts me like a good cup of fresh black coffee.
Guess I’m in a nostalgic mood. Perhaps it’s the day. With gusty winds, leaves turning yellow and gold and dancing as they leap from trees, a blue sky so clear you can see tomorrow, and a bit of balmy warmth creeping in, it feels like a perfect autumn day. At least, this is how I remember perfect autumn days. They make me want to go somewhere, do things, visit with friends, and chat with nature.
Totally lifts my spirit even while I hunger to beg off the usual routines, jump in the car, and be off. With some amusement, as I did the dress-feed the cats–make breakfast and coffee routine, I was humming sotto voce. Catching the tune, I put words to it with surprise.
The song was from 1981. I was twenty-five then, feeling good about life and prospects. The year’s beginning had us living in base housing at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas, driving a new metallic copper Pontiac Firebird we’d bought the year before. Aunts, uncles, and cousins had moved here from Pittsburgh, PA, and lived nearby, giving us family to visit. Life had an easy rhythm.
By May, we’d sold the car and taken up a new assignment at Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan, a three year tour which began with us living for a few weeks in the base hotel while we bought a used car and found a place to live off base. It was a great adventure.
Here is Santana’s 1981 cover of “Winning”, a song from that time.
Not light music today. Looked at the news landscape and thought, there’s a lot of psychopaths out there, a realization that let the 1977 Talking Heads song, “Psycho Killer”, stream into my mind. A repeat song but it could be the theme music for an entire body of uncaring people who lack empathy and are willing to kill in the name of their love, you know? I liked it up, and it’s been almost three years since I last used it as a theme song. That gives me license in my mind (which is where I’m making up these rules in the first place) to use it again.
A song — well, late youth. By mid-1974, I’d turned adult, becoming a legal adult (well, that varies by state, country, and era, doesn’t it?), graduated high school, left home, and joined the military.
Still, I count “I Can Dance (Long Tall Glasses)” by Leo Sayer as a song from my youth. It’s a fun song. It came to me last night when I started dancing with the cat in the kitchen. I was dancing to another song in my head. My cat (Tucker, the big long-haired black and white fella) was bugging me for something (who knows, with cats?). He sat down to watch, so saying that I was dancing with my cat is a stretch. The look he was gifting me said, “What are you doing?”
To which I replied, “I can dance, you know I can dance.” Summarizing the essence of the Sayer song, he’s hungry, comes across a sign offering friend food and drink, but discovers that you have to dance for your meal. He then goes from claiming he can’t dance to declarations that he can dance.
Sure. It was just a matter of finding the right motivation and having faith in yerself, isn’t it?
It’s 1979. Disco, technopop and technorock, progressive stuff which veers away from heavy guitars, proliferates. As a young man out in the world, I just went with the flow, primarily because, wife. On my own, my preferences veered toward Pink Floyd and The Wall, but it doesn’t have one good dance tune on it, does i?
One of the songs of that era bounced to mind this morning after a bleak review of the news. “Good Times” by Chic was all about the little things that constitute good times – making a rent payment, having a friend. It also savagely mocks the same theme, mentioning keeping your head above water and surviving, yeah, that’s good times.
Sounds perfect for 2020, doesn’t it? Survived the pandemic, good times. Made it through the wildfires and hurricanes, good times. Survived unemployment and hunger, good times.
Or, as the song lyrics originally said:
Temporary lay offs. Good Times. Easy credit rip offs. Good Times. Scratchin’ and survivin’. Good Times. Hangin’ in and jivin’* Good Times. Ain’t we lucky we got ’em Good Times.
I have another Seger offering. As I was checking out the sunset last night — not too red, not too many particulates in the sky — I remembered other sunsets in other places, not so much exact moments but the sense of time. Foremost was being in California, watching sunsets in Half Moon Bay. Too much thule fog kept most of our sunsets from being spectacular.
Even so, infrequently one would slip through. Occasionally, we’d encountered the perfect triad of temperature, sunset, and ocean experience to elevate it to something wonderful that I could draw on for the rest of my life.
That’s where I was last night. Out of that sense of remembrance came Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band with “Hollywood Nights” (1978). That song captures a sense of fundamental change. After such an experience, nothing is seen as the same again.
A night of intense but entertaining dreams had finished. The day was beginning with the emptying of the bladder and the feeding of the cats. They’d surrounded me and, despite bowls of kibble, were claiming starvation.
The activities engaged are the automatic sort, not much thinking required, leaving me free to ponder the dreams. That led to a Queensryche line from “Silent Lucidity” (1991):
“Your dream is over… or has it just begun?”
I mean, my dreams had been unfathomably lucid, where I as myself in my dream was interviewing the me having the dream, about a dream which was still taking place. So, I ponder, were there three dream version of me happening simultaneously, which led now to the conscious ‘real’ me pondering those three dream people? Or was this another dream?
My wife made some delicious spicy chick pea soup for dinner yesterday. We both love soups, and she delights in finding healthy recipes.
It was good soup weather, coolish but sunny, with a blue sky that let us see the far mountains. As I sat to eat the soup, I regarded its contents and breathed its aroma. Spinach, chick peas, carrots…good stuff, made with her homemade stock. Warm ciabatta bread (we’re mad about ciabatta bread) was available. Dipping the bread in the soup and eating it as the soup cooled was almost orgasmic.
After tasting it, I said, “This is great soup. What a wonderful smell. Thanks for making it.”
She said nothing. After a few minutes of quiet eating, she offered, “This is good soup, isn’t it?”
I kept eating but I thought, is this a trap? Did she not hear me before? Is she fishing for compliments, or just being redundant? (That’s probably the wrong way to think of it.)
In the past, I may have sniffed, “I just said that.” This time, I answered, “Yes, this is great soup. Thanks for making it.”
But my mind jumped on a train of thoughts about comments I’d made throughout the day that didn’t gain me a reply, no reply at all.
Which took me to the Genesis song from 1981, “No Reply at All”.
Today’s song, “Slide” by the Goo Goo Dolls (1998) is about a pregnant girl and her situation, slide always means, I gotta go. We consistently used it in the military during my career. It was a throwaway: “Hey, I gotta slide, see you later.”
Don’t know why it came up today, though. Just started up in my head, “Why don’t you slide.” Just one of those free-association memory things, I guess. Or maybe it was a subconscious desire to go somewhere and do something under the kind of sunlit blue skies
Today’s song came out in 1994. IBM had just purchased the company who employed me; that company had purchased the start-up that I’d been working for. So my employment record was like Russian dolls (which originated in Japan, BTW).
We were living in Half Moon Bay, CA, and had a comfortable life. But I had an uncomfortable feeling it was going in the wrong direction. We started making plans about where we could move. Texas? North Carolina? Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Mexico, Washington…we roamed the net, searching for answers.
I’d just sold a few short stories, so I as feeling good about that. This song came out. Catching me by surprise on the radio, the repeated chorus, “What you waiting for”, seemed expressed directly at me. I listened to see who it was, but the radio didn’t say.
I hunted it down on the net, learning it was Gwen Stefani, “What You Waiting For?” Later, I read that she’d written the song in response to having writer’s block. That resonated with me.
All of that is background. Today, it was about the cats. Our air is at 52. Don’t even smell smoke any more (which reminds me, check on the fires up north and down south). The cats had been released when we hit moderate on the AQI scale, much to their joy. Today, I had the door open to let in Tucker.
He paused to sniff the air before entering, then sat down. Looking up, he intently regarded me. To which I said (yeah, you know), “What you waiting for?”
It’s a good song for today. What are you waiting for? November? Clean skies and better weather? An end to the pandemic? A sign of God.
Michael Seidel, writer 