A New Song Flying Around the Bay Area

Song 192: Today I posted the song Wings by Wendy Beckerman, who also wrote the song, on the playlist. Every seventh song on the list is one by a friend, and since it was time for another friend's song, today's song is by my friend Wendy Beckerman. She was one of the regulars of the Fast Folk songwriter's group that used to meet once a week in Jack Hardy's Greenwich Village apartment back around the turn of the '90s, at a time when I was also making that Thursday night scene when I could, and I liked a lot of what I heard from her during that era. I also got to play the hero for her one afternoon when she moved into a new apartment. A group had assembled to help her with the move, and I was down on the street level with a couple of other guys, getting stuff off of the truck, when word came down that the couch a couple of other guys had carried all the way up to the 6th floor wouldn't make it around the bend at the apartment entrance. I walked up to check out the situation, since the building didn't have an elevator, and I suggested that if they just stood the couch up on one end, it would fit through the door and down the hall, which it did. The other guys liked not having to carry the couch back down six flights, but they were also surprised that I had reached such a simple solution so quickly. On reflection, it didn't surprise me that none of them had thought of it, because I had already concluded that most of the Fast Folk bunch were sound people, and not visual people, so visualizing alternatives did not come naturally to them the way it does to me. Some of us are visual people, some are sound people, and some are kinetic (touching) people, as a scientist I once heard on the radio explained it, so that afternoon, having one visual person on a crew saved the day for Wendy and her couch. These days she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived back in the '80s, and I hadn't heard much of her recent music, but then a couple of newer Wendy Beckerman songs showed up on YouTube a few weeks ago, and I really like both of them. I'll have to hear this one a few more times before I get all the lyrics down, but only hearing it a few times, I really like the sound of the melody and the chords, and the lyrics sound intriguing -- I really think I'm going to like the lines when I figure them out.

He Turned 21 in Prison

Song 191: Today I posted Mama Tried by Merle Haggard on the playlist. The YouTube video visual is a bunch of stills of Merle, and I really like the one of him holding a guitar while standing by a stream -- the perspective of the pose reminds me of a similar picture of me, taken by Su Polo. I also like the picture of him sitting on a bench, which reminds me of some of the footage of me sitting on a bench that shows up in the music video of As Long As Merle is Still Haggard. Last week I posted a song by Waylon Jennings, and in doing so, I realized that I hadn't previously included any songs by him, Merle, Willie, or Charlie Pride. Since I mention all of them in the chorus of the Merle song, and they've all done songs that I really like, it seemed like I ought to get at least one song by each of them onto this list, and especially Merle. This song tops my list of Merle favorites, at least in part because of the lines about riding a freight train. Merle had an adventurous youth, as the Pure Prairie League song I'll Fix Your Flat Tire, Merle happens to mention, though I'm not sure about the telephone booth part, but that adventurous youth included riding freight trains, and also doing a stretch at San Quentin Prison in 1958, where he turned 21, though he was not doing life without parole. While at San Quentin, he got to see a Johnny Cash performance, and that inspired him to join the prison country band, though he had already developed an interest in singing country music. I've read that when Merle met Johnny Cash for the first time, he mentioned that he saw him at San Quentin. Cash, thinking that Merle was referring to his 1969 show there (which yielded the live LP At San Quentin), said he didn't remember Merle being on that show, and Merle replied that he was in the audience (at a much earlier concert, of course). Fortunately for Merle, and for people who like country music, Hag got himself into a slight-less adventurous lifestyle in the early 1960s that led to songs like this. I got to see Merle playing at a small club in Manhattan a couple of times in the late 1990s, and he and his band were putting on a pretty good show then, as I would expect they probably are still doing these days as well. On a side note, you can find the song video for my song As Long As Merle is Still Haggard by clicking on the title.

A Song the DJ Really Liked

Song 190: Today I posted Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way? by Waylon Jennings on the playlist. As the early '70s became the mid-'70s, Chicago-area radio just seemed to get worse, but still, spending time in traffic back then usually meant depending on the radio for music. Generally I would switch between stations searching for a song I liked, or at least one I could stand to listen to, and once in a while I found a gem. On an afternoon some time in 1975, DJ Larry Lujack played this song, but before he did, he gave it a really good introduction. On air, Lujack had a very sarcastic manner, and on this particular afternoon, he mentioned that listeners had been commenting that he didn't seem to think much of the music he played. He then said that as he saw it, rock and roll was getting worse, not better (I silently nodded in agreement), but his job was to air songs listeners wanted to hear, so if it made the charts and got requests, he'd play it no matter how he felt about it. But hey, were there any new songs that he did like? Well, here's one... Before those opening chords, I knew nothing about Waylon, his past connections with Buddy Holly, or his contemporary collaborations with Willie, but not long into this song, I knew I not only had to get the record, I had to find out more about the guy who made it. I would soon start adding Waylon LPs to my collection, and finding out a lot more about the man and his music. As I mention for song 179 (Bob Seger's Turn the Page), in this era, I heard a lot of Been on the Road Too Long songs, and most of them made me want to say, "Oh, Cry Me a River" (song 67), but once in a while, someone like Seger or Jennings would actually breathe some genuine life experience into the tired old cliches. In this song, Waylon calls up the ghost of one of the original country singer-songwriters and pays homage to that spirit while also painting a clear picture of his own day-to-day struggles. If you like country music, then most likely you too have some favorite Hank songs, just as Waylon did, and as I do. One sad side note -- I knew that Waylon died in February of 2002, but I only learned today that Larry Lujack died in December of 2013. On a different side note, this is the first posting on the list of an artist mentioned in my song As Long as Merle is Still Haggard, and you can find the song video for that song just by clicking on the title.

Singing Along With a Hit Song

Song 189: Today I added Green, Green by The New Christy Minstrels (written by Barry McGuire and Randy Sparks) to my Favorite Songs Playlist. As a rule, my family didn't listen to the radio much during my younger years, and so in the era before the Beatles came along, I mainly heard songs from the radio in public places, or on visits to friends. Once in a while they did turn the radio on in the car going somewhere, though, and I think that's how I first heard this song, when it came along in the summer of 1963, and it then suddenly became a reason for me to try to get them to put the radio on. I had heard and learned a few other folk and country songs over the previous year, but this was the first hit song that I really, really learned. After only hearing it a few times, I had the words memorized and I would sing along with it, much to the amusement of my parents and grandparents. They must have truly enjoyed hearing their primary-school-age son deliver lines like I told my mama on the day I was born, "Don't you cry when you see I'm gone." I even tried to imitate Barry McGuire's rough-edged voice, but I couldn't really get it down. About 6 months later, the Beatles would open up a whole new world for me, and a new-found adoration of rock-and-roll, which I thought they and the other English bands had invented. That would so overshadow my previous enjoyment of a handful of folk songs that when Eve of Destruction blasted out of a transistor radio only 2 years after Green, Green, I didn't even recognize the singer. At the time that Green, Green came along, though, I quickly learned every word he was singing, and I tried to sound like him when I sang along, though I really couldn't sound like him, no matter how hard I tried. That summer, though, it was a lot of fun hearing that song and singing along in the family car on the way to somewhere, which would not happen when the English Invasion came along the following winter.

Be Careful of Loving a Wild Thing

Song 188: Today I added Wild Things by Cris Williamson to my Favorite Songs Playlist, to offer some contrast to last week's post, in a song with almost the same title. In the late '70s one of my folkie singer/songwriter friends, Nancy Milin, performed this song one night, probably at either Freight and Salvage or La Val's Pizza, which were the 2 major venues for our circle at the time. I liked the tune a lot, so I asked her about it, and not long after hearing it I got a copy of the CW album. The song offers a more serious and thoughtful tone, in contrast to the playful and raucous feel of the Troggs recording, as a cautionary tale about the reality of trying to live with a wild thing. The Wild Thing of the Troggs tune makes everything groovy, but then Cris Williamson reminds us that Wild Things can turn on you, and that no matter how much you might love the see the spirit of a wild thing, as we all so often do, in the end, you've got to set them free. She reminds us that wild things can have sharp teeth, and that they live another way. This song also made me do a bit of soul-searching, asking myself if I had hurt someone close to me by following the call of the wild, and having to admit to myself that surely I had, whether I had meant to do so or not.