Sunday, March 24, 2024

Enjoying Wet Evenings

 Song 712: This week on the playlist you can hear I Love a Rainy Night by Eddie Rabbitt, written by David Malloy, Eddie Rabbitt and Even Stevens, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. When this amorous anthem came along around the beginning of 1981, I had gotten a few months into a third year at an attractive comfortable home in Oakland, CA. I would often spend time sitting by the place's small front porch with my housemate and close friend Doug, listening to the interesting sounds the radio brought our way as we savored the moderate Bay Area temperatures, and this one quickly got us both roped in. While I didn't feel the same enjoyment of precipitous experiences that the singer expressed, I greatly appreciated having left the frigid Windy City, and, given the choice, I would much prefer warm downpour over chilly white flurries. I might NOT love to hear the thunder, but I could watch the lightning when it would light up the sky at night, and it felt good to know I would probably wake up to a sunny day the next morning.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Small Pair Vehicle

 Song 711: This week the playlist puts the spotlight on Little Deuce Coupe by The Beach Boys, written by Brian Wilson and Roger Christian, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. After the Beatles rocked my world 60 years ago in February, I mostly paid attention to the British Invaders, but a few hits from this side of the Atlantic Ocean also lit my ears, including a handful of chart toppers from a particular West Coast quintet of seashore fellows. This moving hot rod ride had arrived during the previous summer, before I got pulled into the RnR airwave current, and when I heard it soon after I started spending more time with the transistor radio, I probably didn’t know it was a golden oldie, but I sure did know that I enjoyed the musical zone that it quickly covered. Hearing it felt like coming off the line when the light turns green, and it made me feel like maybe I had a set of wings so that, in a tuneful way, I could flyOn a sad side note, I decided to do a Beach Boys song this week after hearing the sad news that Brian Wilson lost his wife in January of this year. I feel sorry for his loss, and I wanted to send some good vibes his way.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Fantastic Guy's Aging Difficulties

 Song 710: Seven weeks after my previous personal friend song post, this week's amusing lift Superman's Midlife Crisis comes from a buddy who I connected with in the 1990s named Joe Giacoio, who also wrote the song, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. He joined my mailing list after attending a performance I did on a Bronx folk stage, and not long after, I heard him play at another place in the area and I liked what I heard from him. We soon developed a close friendship, and when he compiled the 1997 album CD that would have this ballad as its title track, I took pictures of him for the project and helped him put together the record's imagery, which I'd say personifies this tune's message. If you haven't heard the song, you might not know that Spiderman took a job with accounting, but you may very well understand that you can't turn back the clock for a quick trip home and you probably realize that you can't change clothes behind a cellular phone.

Sunday, March 3, 2024

Checked You Out

 Song 709: This week the playlist recognizes I Looked at You by The Doors, who also wrote the song, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Three years and a half after the Fab Four rocked my world, just as they started heading in a psychedelic direction, a fresh L.A. quartet rocked the charts and while I couldn't own a devil's music 33 at the time, I had plenty of friends who could, and did, open up The Doors LP and ride around its spins, so I soon got to know the entire album, even though I never listened to it at home, and it quickly became one of my favorite discs. Over the next two years, as I worked on the student newspaper with a handful of my fellow classmates, we would put together the periodical in a certain room at the HS after classes ended, leaving the school when we finished it a few hours after most of the other students had departed. As we put together each issue, we would also listen to records we liked, and I know we always had The Doors on the turntable for every edition we assembled in those years. When I remember the student newspaper work we did, I always associate it with The Doors, to the point that I don't recall any of the other records we listened to, even though I know we did spin other discs on the player as well. When we started getting an issue's articles together and editing the contents, once we were on our way, we could, and would, never turn back - we would get the job done, even when it meant that a few of us might get home from school too late.

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Provide Your Complete Passion

 Song 708: Last week's thought was Let's Work Together and the week before was the moment for All My Loving, so this week seems like the right time to Gimme All Your Lovin' by ZZ Top, written by Billy Gibbons, and you can find an amusing YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. By the time such a rocking plea got a lot of listeners going along with that request in early 1983, I had resided for about a year and a half in a really pleasant home in Berkeley, CA, that sat near the pizza joint where the singer/songwriter circle that I had joined a few years earlier would regularly gather and share compositions. I had become a fan of the lurching Texas trio soon after they appeared near the beginning of the 1970s, and had actually attended a concert they did in Chicago in early 1977, so it didn't take long for them to get me singing along with their 1983 bluesy call. I soon understood that when someone has got to move it up that they should work it like a screwball would.

Sunday, February 18, 2024

Common Efforts

 Song 707: This week on the playlist you can hear Let's Work Together by Canned Heat, written by Wilbert Harrison, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Shortly before my sophomore college year began in September of 1970, this bluesy anthem started getting everyone to sing along, and it conveyed a message that most of my classmates, and probably the majority of university scholars around the country, had come to understand quite clearly in the spring of that year. Soon after the 5/4/70 event, I joined demonstrations at N.U. which echoed gatherings across the nation that expressed our anger at the killing of four Kent State pupils, and while our voices speaking out didn't end the Vietnam War, as far as I know, no other student protesters in the U.S. got shot down during the following years as opposition to the Southeast Asia conflict continued to swell. Many of us would walk hand in hand when we had a good place to stand to voice our disapproval of that mass murder.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

My Entire Passion

 Song 706: This week the playlist applauds All My Loving by The Beatles, written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Sixty years ago, fairly soon after I got to my junior high school on the morning of 2/10, I started hearing my classmates use a word that I thought referred to a group of insects, but I couldn't imagine why such conversations would happen in the middle of a cold upstate NY winter. Since I had no clue about the big story I had missed, I also didn't know what question to ask, but after a couple of days I finally did pose a question to my neighbor playmate. He chuckled to learn that his smart buddy didn't know the biggest news of the previous week. Finding out about what my family and I had missed on Sunday night, we all planned to watch the 2/16 Ed Sullivan Show, and when we did so, although the rest of our circle had no interest in what they heard and saw, my younger brother and I got roped in, and we insisted on viewing the entire program, contrary to other family members who wanted to shut off the TV. Watching them perform She Loves You, (Song 653), the Fab Four rocked my world. I thought their next tune sounded really cool, and then they got to this one, which felt even better. Witnessing that performance sparked a whole new view of the musical world for me, and gave me hope that my dreams will come true.