That Title Sounds Familiar

Song 274: This week on the playlist you can hear If I Was Your Man by Joan Osborne, written by Joan Osborne, Joseph Arthur, Louie Pérez, Rick Chertoff and Jack Petruzzelli. It seemed like a good time to post a Joan Osborne track because she's performing in my town tonight, though, due to some contrary circumstances, I can't make the gig, as much as I might wish I could. Back around the turn of the new millennium, I happened to catch a Joan set on TV, and I liked what I heard, both in the sound of her voice and in the songs she sang. She performed cuts from her then-current CD Righteous Love, and when she got to this one, it grabbed my attention with its layered sitar sound and an alluring melody that lingered in my mind. I still remember that magic TV moment, and I soon added Righteous Love to the CD collection. A few years later, when a friend gave me an iPod for Christmas, I made a place for RL in the iTunes list. Around the turn of the new decade, working on Who Said What, I would sometimes key up mixes of my own songs on the iPod as I rode the train into Manhattan, and sometimes other people's music, often including Righteous Love, so I might listen to my song If I Was You and then, not long after, I would listen to Joan's song If I Was Your Man. Both her song and mine are incorrectly worded -- the correct form of both phrases would use Were instead of Was -- and Daisy, who is the wife of my recording partner, engineer and co-producer David Seitz, didn't hesitate to mention that to me, mainly because she's a teacher and she doesn't appreciate the way performing musicians can lead her young charges astray, but the way I figure it, Joan's probably leading more of them astray than me at the moment, and if she can get away with it, then maybe I can slide too. Of course, I'm not trying to tell you what to do, but If I Was You, I'd cut me some slack on that one, and give Joan some room as well. You can find the song video for my track just by clicking on the title.

Time to Stop Running

Song 273: This week's playlist track offers a bit of advice in its title which is Walk, Don't Run by The Ventures, written by Johnny Smith. In the summer of 1960 I knew nothing about rock 'n roll, even though I had posed for a picture wearing a hat with those words on it a few years earlier, and at the turn of the '60s my family did not yet own a transistor radio, but those magic little music boxes had started popping up in my neighborhood, so sometimes I would hear some music somewhere, though I didn't have much of a focus on it at the time. Once during the previous school year, in 3rd grade, a classmate had passed me a radio during a break and I put it up to my ear for a few minutes, as everyone else was doing, but I didn't really connect with what I was hearing, so I gladly passed it on to the next kid sooner than might have been expected. That summer, though, I heard this cut coming out of transistor radios a lot. About a half mile from my home, the town held a regular summer activity program for kids, which involved a lot of fun pursuits like board games, plaster sculptures and picture painting, taking place outdoors on folding tables under tents, and the setup always included a radio, so I remember hearing this track a number of times at that park, and it seemed to go well with the activities. Fast forward 2 decades, and in the early '80s, the surf music of bands like the Ventures experienced a revival, so one day I tumbled into a conversation with Mark Worsley, the brother of my band mate Clive who was himself a musician as well, and he talked about the differences between Walk, Don't Run (the 1960 version) and Walk, Don't Run '64 (the 1964 version, which was also a hit for the Ventures). I played along without letting on that I didn't recognize what song he was actually talking about, but when I got back to my place, I soon had the platter on the turntable, and the instant recognition felt like reconnecting with a long-lost favorite old friend. Since then, I've made sure not to let too much time go by without reconnecting with that favorite old friend once again. The YT link for this song on my website connects to a video of a TV appearance the Ventures did around the time of the record's chart run, and you might notice that the band's electric guitars have no cords connected to amps, so they were evidently wireless long before there was wireless, and their performance does sound remarkably like the record, doesn't it -- so much so, in fact, that it might make you wonder if the musicians were just miming to the record. Of course, the audience didn't seem to mind, rocking right along, with some of them even looking like they were chewing gum in time with the song, and I'm sure when they left the theater that night, they all knew that they should walk and not run.

Time to Run

Song 272: This week's playlist track turns out to be Running Down the Road by Arlo Guthrie, who also wrote the song. Somehow I got to a pretty high playlist number before posting an Arlo track, so I'll need to make sure his second appearance on the list comes along sooner than later, but for now, this week's cut about running follows last week's song about walking. (If you haven't guessed what's up for next week, I'll just give you a hint that it's an instrumental track.) All I knew of AG in the late '60s was the chorus to Alice's Restaurant -- I didn't hear the record, but only heard a couple of people sing the chorus and play it on guitar. It sounded old-timey to me, and a bit quaint in the context of Break on Through, Born to Be Wild and similar songs of the era. I didn't get the joke, and I also knew nothing about Arlo's father -- my mother sang songs like This Land is Your Land and Do Re Mi but I doubt she had any idea who wrote them, any more than I did. When I landed at Northwestern in the fall of 1969, one of the first things I planned to do was to begin collecting LPs, and a couple of months into that plan, I made the mistake of joining a record club, which led to receiving a few albums in the mail that I hadn't actually wanted. One day, Arlo's latest LP Running Down the Road arrived, even though I had mailed in my card telling the club not to send it, and so I had to own it, whether I wanted it or not. I played it through once or twice, and I decided I didn't want it, but I had to pay for it, so I wasn't going to throw it away. When I mentioned to Hank Neuberger, who lived in the dorm room across the hall from me, about my frustration at getting a record I didn't want, he told me he'd like to have the album, and so I sold it to him right then and there. Over the next few months, I started listening to more singer/songwriter music, and started moving more in that direction as a musician, plus I heard more of Arlo, and learned more about him and his father, to the point that, by the fall of 1970, I was wishing I hadn't sold the LP to Hank, and I ended up getting another copy at the local record store. As soon as I got it back to my apartment, I had it on the turntable, and it would take many spins there in the coming years, leading me to ask myself more than once how I could have misjudged the album so badly. I had become quite picky in my listening, and on some records I would only play certain cuts, so I really appreciated LPs like RDtR where I could enjoy every track from start to finish. Some albums put the best track first, which in the CD era happens more often than not, but in the LP days, sometimes the last cut would be the best, and in this case, the title track that closes the album always had my vote for number one.

Watch Your Step

Song 271: If you get around to the playlist this week you'll get to Walk Like an Egyptian by The Bangles, written by Liam Sternberg. From the first time I heard this song I assumed that Steve Martin's King Tut skit from a few years earlier must have played a main role in inspiring it, although the songwriter does not credit the Tut bit at all. Martin's sketch became a standard comic routine between me and my Oakland housemate Doug not long after we first saw it, and we both would often Walk Like an Egyptian for a few moments of shared personal comedy, so when this track lit up the airwaves in the early fall of '86, it felt like such a natural fit that it sounded as if I'd heard it before, in a previous life or something, perhaps in the incarnation of an old painting on a tomb in the shadow of the pyramids. This cut, BTW, is but one highlight on an excellent album called Different Light that contains many more, and I highly recommend it, particularly if you like this track. No matter how many times I've listened to it, to this day, it still makes me smile, and brings back images of Doug and me clowning for each other with our Egyptian hieroglyphic moves. I lost touch with Doug a few years ago and haven't managed to reconnect, so I can't speak for him, but for myself, I still can slide my feet up the street, bend my back, shift my arm and so on, and it feels good to do it, even in the absence of my old friend. If you don't believe me, give it a try yourself, and I'll bet that you'll like it -- try to Walk Like an Egyptian for a few moments and see how good it feels.