U2 is hot and cold for me. I really enjoy The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum albums, but I was less enthused about others. This song, “Mysterious Ways” from Achtung, Baby, is my favorite track from that album. I like the mystic romantic aspects the lyrics present, and the sharp guitar hook juxtaposed against the beat and bass line. It’s a song that I crank up, and one that I sing to my cats. I sing it to myself, too, as I contemplate the world and my writing. Talk about mysterious ways.
Saturday’s Theme Music
From out of the dreams came some streams, and from the streams came some songs….
This one grew more forcefully shaped and remembered as the lyrics echoed through memories’ canyons and flew over plains of time.
I…I will begin again
I…I will begin again
Sometimes, when events took me down, I took strength from music, and lyrics like these. I take strength wherever, however I find it, as it seems like life drains my strength so quickly. It’s good to remember that at the rate that our bodies replace our cells, we’re always being reborn.
From 1983, U2 with “New Year’s Day.”
Friday’s Theme Music
Always enjoy B.B. Is the last name required? We saw him in concert in Santa Cruz during a festival, and loved it. He was such a rascal on stage.
Here he is with U2 performing the King classic, “When Love Comes to Town.”
Today’s Theme Music
“This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We’re stealing it back.”
I was thirteen in 1969. The Tate-LaBianca murders exploded over the news. I remember newspaper headlines, photographs and television news coverage of the Manson Family actions and the subsequent investigations as clearly as I remember the assassinations of RFK, JFK and MLK, the Watts riots, or the Apollo moon landing. Helter Skelter became the symbol of the murders because the words were written in blood at the scene. The murders became books and movies under the name ‘Helter Skelter’. It wasn’t an accident. Charles Manson believed and taught the Beatles’ ‘White Album’, including ‘Helter Kelter’, contained coded messages for him and his followers.
If you can escape the murderous connection, the lyrics are good to sing as you’re walking around:
When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide
And I stop and I turn and I go for a ride
And I get to the bottom and I see you again
The song, written by Paul McCartney, would never be heard the same for many of us. Here is U2, trying to change it back for us in 1988.
Today’s Theme Music
My CD collection is a decent size. It’s amusing to talk about these things in the days of iPods and streaming music via iPhones and smartphones. I have two CD players; one is a Sony turntable style that houses two hundred CDs. It’s full. It plugs into a six CD Bose speaker that’s part of my home theater. Then I have another couple hundred CDs stacked and shelved inside the cabinets. The CDs replaced the cassettes, eight tracks, reels, and thirty-three and forty-five RPM records. Being an organized person, the CD collection on the is alphabetized, although blues, Christmas and symphony collections have their own sections. I have a print out of an Excel spreadsheet that tells me where a particular CD is located in the Sony turntable.
Today’s music comes from an album over thirty years old. It came out while I was stationed in Europe. I developed an immediate and long-lasting infatuation with it. It ended up joining albums from Who, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan, among many others, as one I can listen to again and again. It’s part of the Sony CD turntable. It’s CD number 98, part of section four. The album is not for everyone but that’s the nature of music, isn’t it? One person’s joy revolts and disgusts another.
Here is ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, from ‘The Joshua Tree’ album by U2, 1987.
Michael Seidel, writer 