Sunday, December 25, 2016

A Dazzling Way to Roll

Song 335: This week the playlist comes around to Skateaway by Dire Straits, written by Mark Knopfler. Following last week’s post about Snow, the mention of the falling white stuff might bring skates to mind, though this cut refers to the kind with wheels rather than the kind used to ride over ice. As a kid, I didn’t have any skates, and didn’t have any particular interest in them. At one point during my later HS years, some members of my church youth group planned an outing at a roller rink, and since I generally tried to take part in the group’s activities, I considered going, which led to some strange exchanges where I learned about the differences of opinion between the local fundamentalists who didn’t approve of roller-skating and those who considered it permissible. I didn’t actually put on any skates then, but a few years later, at the age of 21, I did try the rollers, but without much success, though perhaps some onlookers found my struggles amusing. At 24, I stepped into a pair of ice skates on a March afternoon and had just as little success with them as I had had with the rollers. With that history behind me, I couldn’t help but notice the roller skating trend that appeared on many East Bay streets around the time this record came out in the fall of 1980. The track perfectly encapsulated that era, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the skater who inspired the lyrics had been one of the roller aces who zoomed by me in a flash. Of course, these days, if someone in a big city like NY wants to torture taxi drivers just for fun they’ll probably do it with a bike, but queen rollerball could still be sailing through the crowd as well.

Sunday, December 18, 2016

Winter Wonderland Weather

Song 334: This week on the playlist you can hear Snow by Jesse Winchester, written by Robbie Robertson and Jesse Winchester. Growing up in the Northeast, I enjoyed winter just as much as the other seasons, and didn’t have a specific preference, but that started to change when I began my college stretch at N.U. I noticed during my first January in the Chicago area that I seemed to hear a lot of single digit and negative temps in the forecast, but it took a year or 2 for me to clearly understand that even though I hadn’t landed any further north than where I grew up, that portion of the upper midwest is significantly colder during the winter months than my hometown. Not long after I began at N.U., Jesse Winchester’s eponymous debut LP came along, and since I liked every cut I heard from it, at a certain point in the next year or 2, I picked up a copy. I hadn’t caught this particular tune before, but that first spin on the turntable, it got my attention, and that of at least one roommate. I had already experienced too much of the Chicago area’s winter weather, as had my roommate, and we both felt we would rather not be there when the snow starts getting deep. That four-letter word had become something of a curse, so as soon as I could do it, I left the midwest and headed to CA. I didn’t miss the snow, but circumstances would eventually compel me to return to it. The white stuff doesn’t seem as oppressive in my corner of the Northeast as it did in the Chicago area, but I have seen a lot more of it lately than I care to, so this track seems to perfectly express the feeling of the current moment. On a sad note, Jesse Winchester died in the spring of 2014, but he left behind a significant set of recordings, which I plan to draw more from for this list in the future, especially to make up for the fact that I hadn’t posted a JW cut prior to this one.

Monday, December 12, 2016

Worth the Effort

Song 333: This week the playlist gets around to Try (just a little bit harder) by Janis Joplin, written by Jerry Ragovoy and Chip Taylor. This track opens Janis’s album I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama! which got released 2 days after I turned 18 as an incoming freshman at N.U., but because I started my college career with no LPs at all, I had a bunch of others I wanted to get to first (the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, the Doors), and I didn’t circle around to Janis until about a year later, just around the time she left the land of the living. During my HS days, I didn’t really like her vocal style, what little I heard of it, but months before I turned 19, I had developed a much greater appreciation of her singing talent, which this cut showcases quite well. On an ironic note, I wrote a song for my HS group called You Try Too Hard, and if I had heard this JJ piece then, I probably would have felt like my lyrics were the perfect answer to her words here, though I would come to a completely different angle by the occasion of her demise. In that season, I would have relished being the guy who she felt was someone so fine that she would have wanted to show me love with no control. Had I dreamed such a dream in that stretch, I would have wanted nobody to wake me.

Sunday, December 4, 2016

The Spirit of Not Receiving

Song 332: This week on the playlist you can hear On Christmas I Got Nothing by Chuck Brodsky, who also wrote the song. Seven weeks after my last song post by a personal friend, and only three weeks before Christmas, it seemed like the most appropriate time to feature this track by my friend Chuck Brodsky. During HS, I had one Jewish close friend, plus a number of other Jewish classmates, so I had a vague understanding of Jewish holidays and the differences with Christian ones. Of course, even by the time of my growing up in the ‘60s, Christmas had long been as much a secular holiday as a religious one in this country, so I discovered that some Jewish people celebrated Santa day, though evidently Chuck’s family did not. When I first learned about Hanukkah, I heard that it might include giving a single gift each night along with the candle lighting, but my Jewish friends soon let me know that even if they did observe the Jewish holiday — and some didn’t — there was no Christmas-like exchange of gifts, so I understand that Chuck’s lyrics tell the true story of his Jewish December memories. His tune sets a festive tone for the holiday season, and perhaps if it becomes better know at some point over the next few years, Chuck may have the honor of being officially designated as part of Bill O’Reilly’s War On Christmas!

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Getting the Lighting Right

Song 331: This week on the playlist you can hear In a Different Light by The Bangles, written by Susanna Hoffs and Vicki Peterson. When The Bangles came along in the mid-‘80s, they may very well have been the group that ended the argument over whether an all-female band could rock and roll to the same degree that an all-male outfit or a mixed group could — they certainly had me rocking. This song, which is a sort of title track for their second LP Different Light, appeared as the second cut on side 1, coming right after the opener Manic Monday. That opening Prince composition, credited to the pseudonym Christopher, justifiably took the quartet to the top of the charts, but when I put the album on the turntable, I always liked track two better, particularly savoring the lyrical metaphors that playfully hint at the differences between the singer’s romantic imagination and the disappointing reality of the you who is the song’s subject. Between the lines, I could easily picture a lover who left the singer feeling like she would rather sit in a darkened room and only look at her old squeeze from a distance.

Sunday, November 20, 2016

A Name to Remember

Song 330: This week on the playlist you can hear Jack Straw by The Grateful Dead, written by Robert Hunter and Bob Weir. This track is another rock and roll cowboy movie, similar to the one from 3 weeks ago (Song 327) The Lights of Downtown by The Long Ryders. While it appeared on the triple album Europe ’72 which arrived in November of that year, I didn’t get to know it until the middle of the following decade. Living and sharing a 6-bedroom house in Berkeley with 5 others, at some point around ’85 or so, I welcomed a new housemate named Mikey who moved into the back room right next to the kitchen. Like everyone else in the house, I spent a certain amount of time in the kitchen making meals, eating them and cleaning up after them, and Mikey being a sociable guy, he often had his door open and his stereo playing. He would spin Europe ’72 a lot more than any other records, and I certainly didn’t mind. I quickly got to know and like the entire 3-disk set, with this cut soon becoming a favorite. Having been raised in a religious Christian setting, I couldn’t help but feel the irony expressed in the lines about jumping a watchman, stealing his rings and his money, and then asking ain’t that Heaven sent? No matter how many times I’ve heard this track, though, it never hurts my ears to listen to it once more.

Monday, November 14, 2016

Some Women You Might Have Met

Song 329: This week on the playlist you can hear Sisters of Mercy by Leonard Cohen, who also wrote the song. Tonight I feel a certain sense of inevitability in following up last week’s track by one of the original singer/songwriter types, Hank Williams, with a cut by a singer/songwriter from a later era who shared the same astrological sun sign, and who died a week ago, on 11/7. In the late spring of 1970 I took advantage of a local record store special and added a pair of Judy Collins LPs to my collection, with Wildflowers being one of the two. Over the following summer, as I struggled to forge my own unique musical identity, I listened to that album a lot, and soon got to know the words of the songs by heart, including all 3 of the LC compositions. I had also entered into a new phase of the Christian belief that I had grown up with, and at a certain point in time that summer, one of Leonard’s couplets from this tune opened up an enlightening moment for me, as I listened to Judy sing  “I’ve been where you’re hanging, I think I can see how you’re pinned: When you’re not feeling holy your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.” Recognizing the hang-up, I promptly disconnected from the pin, and immediately felt freer and more at ease. I’m glad that the Sisters of Mercy brought Leonard some comfort in his life, and while sadly he’s no longer around to give directions, I would guess that anyone looking for the sisters can still read their address by the moon.

Sunday, November 6, 2016

Needing Some Room

Song 328: This week the playlist comes around to Move It on Over by Hank Williams, who also wrote the song. When Hank had his first big hit on the country charts in 1947, rock and roll did not yet exist as an official music genre, but hearing this track now, it certainly sounds like an early version of the concept. Junior has even claimed that his father invented rock and roll, though Senior had a few contemporaries approaching a similar synthesis from different directions, such as blues singer Roy Brown who did Good Rocking Tonight that same year. This cut definitely proves that Hank started his remarkable, short-lived, troubled, prolific and monumental career with a bang, though, as he shows off the musical lessons he had learned as a teenager from blues street player Rufus Tee-Tot Payne. While I remember hearing lots of HW records during my pre-teen summer visits with Ohio relatives, I don’t recall meeting this piece until George Thorogood’s cover came across the airwaves in late 1978, and when I learned that it was a Hank tune, I felt that I could gladly slide it on over to give that hot dog even more of my musical respect than the large amount I had already earmarked for him because I felt he had earned it.

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Lighting a Dark Memory

Song 327: This week on the playlist you can hear The Lights of Downtown by The Long Ryders, written by Stephen McCarthy. It seemed appropriate to follow up last week’s track by The Byrds with one by The Long Ryders, who not only drew obvious inspiration from The Byrds, but who also had the honor of working with original Byrds member Gene Clark while recording their first full-length album Native Sons. One of my CA musician friends introduced me to the music of The Long Ryders by giving me a cassette of his favorite LR cuts, and not long into my first time through with that collection, listening to the car tape player while cruising the East Bay in my ’67 Plymouth Fury, I had become a fan. This number from their 1985 LP The State of Our Union sounded to me like a kind of musical cowboy movie, and it quickly got my attention as being one of the best of the bunch. As a kid, I had enjoyed plenty of cowboy movies and TV shows that revolved around an almost-cartoonish level of violence, but I had also understood the clear distinction between such entertainment and the real-life experience of brutality, which I sought to avoid in my own life, as much as possible. The words of this song echo the thoughts I had growing up about the deep regret that I knew I’d feel if I ever took someone else’s life, or caused someone serious lasting physical harm. One lesson that I absorbed from the fiction I watched and read as a child was the resolve to walk away, and stay away, from any situation that could potentially lead to the kind of tragic consequences that would leave me shaking my head and having to say I can’t run away, I can’t hide — it’s a slow death for me inside.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

A Special Person

Song 326: This week, if you’ve never made his acquaintance, the playlist can introduce you to Mr. Tambourine Man by The Byrds, written by Bob Dylan. For a little over a year after the Beatles rocked my world, the British Invasion bands dominated the air waves, but then, in the spring of 1965, an American band came along with a huge hit that sounded every bit as good as all of those English spinners, and arguably even better than most of them. Not many of my friends had Byrds records, though, so I didn’t get to hear as much of the band in HS as I would have liked, but I remained interested in their music. I still remember walking into the local guitar store near the HS one day and scrutinizing a Byrds music book, though I didn’t have enough money to buy a copy, but I did try to memorize a few guitar chords. During the graduation week festivities in 1969, on the way back to town from a scheduled celebration at a nearby state park, the radio happened to play this cut, and I well remember how the 4-year-old golden oldie, which was ancient by the standards of that time, filled the window van with a magic sound that created an enduring, enchanted memory. A few years later, in my early 20s in the early ‘70s, after I had acquired all of the necessary Beatles, Dylan, Rolling Stones and other required LPs, I went through an enjoyable Byrds phase, getting acquainted with lesser-known tracks, but also relishing the privilege of having this piece of wizardry at my fingertips whenever I felt like hearing it. At some point during my HS years — possibly during the music book perusal — I had learned that this tune had been written by that same Dylan guy who had written the PP&M hit Blowin’ in the Wind and the S&G cut The Times They Are a-Changin’, and I would start noticing his name attached to other fine songs, though I wouldn’t actually hear Dylan’s voice until the fall of 1969 when I got to Northwestern U. On a side note, it seemed appropriate to follow up last week’s post about a track by my friend Patti Rothberg with a number written by Dylan, because Patti has gotten at least 1 or 2 reviews that favorably compare her work with Bob’s, and I definitely agree with that reviewer POV. 

Sunday, October 16, 2016

What Belongs to Who

Song 325: Seven weeks after my last personal friend song post, this week on the playlist you’ll find This One’s Mine by my friend Patti Rothberg, who also wrote the song, and there’s a YouTube video of her performing it live here. My recording engineer and co-producer David Seitz introduced me to Patti in the fall of 2003, while we were both using the same studio. At the time, I was working on Elder Street, and she was working on Double Standards. I quickly became a PR fan, and her earlier CDs Between the 1 and the 9 and Candelabra Cadabra soon became regular spinners on my player. When I finally got around to getting an iPod, those 2 CDs were also among the first group of albums to find places on the drive, and Patti’s music kept me company on lots of metro rides. This track is the third cut on her debut CD, and like many other PR tracks, has humorous remarks that still make me smile, despite having heard them countless times. If you’ve never experienced Patti’s wit and wisdom before, the line “I could say that you were a dirty dog but that’s an insult to the fleas” can give you a taste of what you’ve missed.

Sunday, October 9, 2016

A Fun-loving Fellow

Song 324: This week on the playlist you can hear Honky-Tonk Man by Dwight Yoakam, written by Johnny Horton, Tillman Franks and Howard Hausey. The original version of this cut came out when I was 4. My Ohio relatives had a good collection of country LPs, and on our summer visits, I essentially had my pick of listening material after I had demonstrated an ability to handle the records and the turntable with appropriate care, so during my grade school years I would soon learn many country classics of the era, getting to know the Honky-Tonk Man long before the Beatles rocked my world. I always appreciated the fun quality of the track, never taking it too seriously, but even as a kid, I thought the guy spending his time and money chasing women in bars and then calling home to ask his wife for help after he blew all of his cash sounded very entertaining in a song, but would have been a jerk in real life. Whatever changes I went through in my teens and twenties regarding viewpoints on relationships, that perspective didn’t change. When Dwight Yoakam’s version came along in 1986, peaking near the top of the country charts, it brought back memories of preteen times. If there’s any truth to the rumor that I played bass for a Bay Area country bar pickup band during a few years of that decade, then it’s quite possible that the group’s lead singer might have called this tune during a set on any given gig night, with the rest of us enthusiastically jumping in. On a side note, this track is a fourth sly reference to the second verse of my own song As Long as Merle is Still Haggard, where the second line begins with But Dwight was only Yoakam when he said… You can find the As Long as Merle is Still Haggard video here.

Sunday, October 2, 2016

A Thrilling Ride

Song 323: This week the playlist rides on The Crystal Ship by The Doors, who also wrote the song. During my HS years, my record collection consisted entirely of 45s, and most of those I bought used from my best friend’s younger brother and smuggled into a special basement hiding spot. Not long after I brought it home, the Doors’ debut single quickly became a regular spinner, and I always listened to both sides, actually preferring this B-side cut to the more famous A-side hit. Even though I owned no LPs in that fall of my junior year at HS, I got to hear The Doors quite a lot at the time, sometimes at friend’s houses and also at certain school gatherings, such as the monthly layout session of the student newspaper where I always played a role, so I soon got to know that disc very well. This track, like most of the others, rattled the religious conflict that I struggled with as I listened to a singer of the devil’s music tell about a ship that would contain a thousand girls and a thousand thrills, feeling quite certain that none of the older generation members at my church would approve of the thrills or the girls, but I enjoyed it so much that I couldn’t resist taking the musical ride on that boat, no matter what it might do to my soul. I’ve always relished Ray Manzarek’s piano solo in the middle of the song, which takes me every time along some magical dark Twilight Zone seas of thought, as it did when I first heard it. Ray died in May of 2013, but his music lives on, and The Crystal Ship still sails.

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Finding Pleasure in the Chaos

Song 322: This week on the playlist you can hear It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) by R.E.M., written by Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe. Last week’s track, Gimme Shelter, featured words very similar to what might these days come out of the mouth of someone living in a war zone in places like Syria and Yemen, and people there probably do feel like it’s the end of the world as they know it, so this cut seemed like an appropriate follow-up, although I doubt very many of those war zone residents would say they feel fine. Listening to this record during the present-day election season, the line “You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light” seems to describe some of what a certain campaign has expressed, and it comes near the end of a verse that has the word trumped in its first line, interestingly enough. As much as I relish this recording and the stream of consciousness dark dreams the words convey, I do hope that when the current tournament of lies reaches its November conclusion, it’s actually not the end of the world as we know it. On a side note, my band Victims of Technology opened for R.E.M. at The Stone in San Francisco back in June of 1983, and I give more details about that in my post for The One I Love (Song 36).

Monday, September 19, 2016

Important Words of Warning

Song 321: This week the playlist comes around to Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, as my pick to honor the International Day of Peace that happens on Wednesday, 9/21. I arrived at Northwestern University’s Bobb Hall in September of 1969 as a major Beatles fan, but Hank Neuberger, who lived across the hall from me, strongly insisted that the Rolling Stones were much better than the Fab Four, and he soon started trying to prove his point. Having a well-stocked collection of LPs and a top quality stereo with large speakers, he happily played a lot of the Stones for my benefit. I heard Let It Bleed (their latest release) many times, and that album soon became a personal favorite. In particular, I remember one late afternoon when Hank put the needle down on it, with the system cranked loudly, and as much as I already liked this song, I felt at that moment that it sounded better than anything and everything, so he had essentially won the debate, at least for the 4 and a half minutes of this cut. Whatever I have attempted, and many other songwriters as well, I would credit Mick and Keith with creating a recording here that conveys the darkly destructive force of war in a much stronger and more compelling way than any other record by anyone else, myself included. At the time I was first hearing this track, I didn’t come close to grasping the horrors that the U.S. military presence was wreaking in Viet Nam and its neighbors, but Merry Cleyton screaming about rape and murder gives a powerful voice to the Apocalypse Now footage in the YouTube video at the link here, and makes you feel the horrific reality of those lyrics. Two decades later, in the period shortly before the 1991 Iraq war, tuned into the local NYC rock station, this track came across the airwaves, and it perfectly fit that moment of dread when people knew that a new war was coming soon. It had lost none of its power, and in fact, sounded even more powerful than it had in 1969. Today, after another 25 years, with Iraq still the scene of armed conflict, among the countless and endless wars raging in that part of the globe, and in far too many other places, this song serves as a forceful warning that war, rape and murder are all, indeed, just a shot away, and at this very moment, someone in Syria or Yemen could be saying, “Ooh, see the fire is sweepin’ our very street today.”

Sunday, September 11, 2016

Expressing Some Genuine Gratitude

Song 320: This week on the playlist you can hear Thanks a Lot  by Third Eye Blind, written by Stephan Jenkins and Kevin Cadogan. As i mentioned in my post for Song 117 (Burning Man), for a while all I knew about Third Eye Blind was their hit Graduate (Song 105), and while I liked that cut quite a bit, I didn’t get particularly motivated to buy their CD until I happened to hear the entire record as background music one night while sharing a meal with a friend at a restaurant in Manhattan. While Graduate and Burning Man stood out as favorites, I quickly found that I liked the sound of the entire record, and it sounds as good to me today as it did 2 decades ago. I also feel no jealousy over the fact that my CD from the same era, called Country Drivin’, includes a track with the same title. In the case of Third Eye Blind, their cut expresses some genuine gratitude, after the singer laughed in the night and felt all right, whereas my song carries a more sarcastic edge, since the night I wrote about turned out in a much different way. I posted a rough cut video of my Thanks a Lot on YouTube a few years ago which you can hear by clicking on the title.

Sunday, September 4, 2016

Feeling Good

Song 319: This week the playlist comes around to Feel Like Makin’ Love by Bad Company, written by Paul Rodgers and Mick Ralphs. In the early ‘70s, rock radio playlists seemed to be getting shorter and shorter, which I took as a sign of a lack of worthy new releases, though I now understand it was actually a matter of consolidation, both of radio stations and record labels. Friends would often talk about whether rock and roll might be coming to an end, and in one such exchange, around the late summer of ’75, I said that while the RnR spirit had become much too rare, there were still records keeping that spirit alive, and I named this cut as being one of those, since it was then currently rocking the airwaves. On a side note, I found out by doing research for this piece that Bad Company bassist Boz Burrell, prior to the formation of the group, played bass and sang lead vocals for King Crimson, though he did so in the era a couple of years after their initial release which featured the title track In the Court of the Crimson King (Song 312 and 7/17/16 Blog Post A Regal Location). Sadly, Mr. Burrell died of a sudden heart attack about 10 years ago, in late September of 2006, while rehearsing in Spain with Scottish blues singer Tam White.

Sunday, August 28, 2016

Knowing Your Own Self Worth

Song 318: This week on the playlist you can hear Wonderful Me by Carol Denney, who also wrote the song. Seven weeks after my last post of a song by a personal friend, this week’s track is by my friend Carol Denney, who, for at least 4 decades, has served as Berkeley, CA’s very own Joni Mitchell, as well as contributing in a strongly-engaged way to the community’s political dialogue. This cut graces her 2009 CD The Riley Boys, and deftly showcases her understated, self-deprecating sense of humor. I have a live recording on cassette of Carol performing this song one night at La Val’s Pizza, back around the turn of the ‘80s, with Shawn Colvin and Nancy Milin adding harmonies, and by the time they finished the performance, the crowd was cheering and laughing loudly at the same time. I do want to express one small criticism of this recording, though — I think it would have added to the humor to follow the line “This way I get more whistling done” with a small bit of whistling, but I can always do that myself when listening to the record, especially if I’m spending a day with myself, since doing so is such a delight

Sunday, August 21, 2016

In a Real Hot Spot

Song 317: This week on the playlist you can find Saint Augustine in Hell by Sting, who also wrote the song. And yes, it is August, and it has been hot lately. When Ten Summoner’s Tales came along in early ’93, a couple of standout tracks, like Fields of Gold (Song 112), got a lot of airplay, and they sounded good enough to convince me to get the CD, but even so, the album still managed to exceed my expectations. I don’t remember hearing this cut on the radio, but it quickly got my attention. You have to admire the way Mr. Sumner does the spoken part in the middle section, pretending to be the devil speaking to his own soul. I always sensed a double meaning in his statement, “OK, break’s over!” Musicians understand the word break as referring to this middle section speaking part, so he’s signaling his backup players that it’s time to return to the next verse, as a lead singer might do with a live ensemble, though it’s hardly necessary on a studio recording. However, I also think the phrase may be a sly reference to a joke about hell that made the rounds back in the late ‘60s. I won’t go into that joke here, but if anyone hasn’t heard it and would like to, query me on my Facebook musician page (link on the website) and I’ll do a post about it. While I enjoy hearing Sting ribbing about his torture over an undeniable attraction to his best friend’s lover, I personally could never allow myself to feel, let along respond, to such an attraction. At one point during HS, a classmate named Sandy caught my eye, and I started to write a song for her, but soon after, my close friend and fellow rock-and-roll dreamer Brian confided to me that he had a strong attraction to her, at which point I decided that if The Initials ever performed Sandy Look This Way then Brian would sing the lead, and dedicate the song to the one who had truly inspired it, while I would not ever indicate that she had created any ripples in my stream. Sadly, The Initials never performed the Sandy song, or any others — we never got close to fulfilling our RnR dreams — and so Sandy never got to hear Brian sing for her a song that I wrote for her. The good news is that I didn’t have to keep company with failed saints and high court judges gathered in a certain very hot spot.

Sunday, August 14, 2016

Give Me A Third Ticket

Song 316: This week the playlist is once again a good place to find The Letter, this time by Joe Cocker, written by Wayne Carson Thompson. About a year after last week’s track had its run on the charts, a 3rd version of the same song showed up on the airwaves and started climbing up to the Top Ten. Over the preceding months, rock radio stations had given a lot of air time to recordings from the Woodstock festival, with Joe Cocker featured prominently in that mix, so this guy I had never heard of before came into focus quite strongly, and then his rocking new single naturally caught my attention, as it did many others. At the point in my career where I sought to forge an original personal musical identity, Joe’s hit provided me with a 45-rpm example of a musician taking a well-known composition and giving it his own personal spin. JC, along with The Arbors and The Box Tops, had shown how one song could be recorded and performed in 3 very different and yet equally-compelling ways. Some may not find all 3 versions as captivating, but I do like them all, and I can’t think of any other rock anthem that appeared in 3 quite distinct models within the space of 3 years and spent so much time on the radio waves and the charts. I hope the songwriter received a sizable wad of cash for his efforts, or at least enough to buy a ticket for an aer-o-plane.

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Give Me Another Ticket

Song 315: This week the playlist is again a good place to find The Letter, this time by The Arbors, written by Wayne Carson Thompson. A little over a year after last week’s track had its run at the top of the charts, another version of the same song appeared on the airwaves and started climbing up the top 40. While the current Wickipedia listing characterizes this version as easy listening, it didn’t strike me that way when I was hearing it back in early ’69, particularly with its forceful dynamics and powerful stacked vocals, and I still don’t hear it as easy listening, even though it made that chart as well as the others. I especially liked the way this group took such a well-known cut and rearranged it so that it sounded totally different and yet quite recognizable. During my HS days, I got most of my singles from my best friend’s younger brother, who sold me his 45s for a quarter each when he got tired of hearing them, but for this one, I actually put out the 69 cents plus tax to get it new at Kmart, and had it spinning on the turntable that same evening. A few week earlier, I bought one other single new at Kmart, that being Hey Jude (Song 23), and while I had hoped to get through the line quickly without my parents noticing that I was buying one of those devilish rock and roll records, my father came up to me as I waited in line, asking me if I knew the whereabouts of my younger brother. I felt like I’d just gotten caught, and I expected to hear him say, “What are you buying?” Instead, he took off in search of his youngest son, and I breathed a sigh of relief. When I bought this single a few weeks later, I made it through the check-out without the parents noticing my purchase, and I kept it artfully hidden on the journey back to the house, so that time around, I added another 45 to the collection without my family knowing that I had done so.

Sunday, July 31, 2016

That’s the Ticket!

Song 314: This week the playlist is a good place to find The Letter by The Box Tops, written by Wayne Carson Thompson. In the summer before my junior year at HS, 49 years ago, I got up early one Saturday morning to go on a hiking trip with other members of my church youth group, and though our parents were still trying to convince us that the rock and roll we listened to was the devil’s music, we always wanted to hear it whenever we could, so even though one of the parents was driving the car I rode in, we youngsters made sure the radio was tuned to the rock station. Somewhere along the road trip going through the Catskills, this song, which was then rising on the charts, came out of the speaker. As good as the single had already sounded to me, it sounded even better at that moment, moving along the two-lane blacktop through beautiful country on a perfect sunny summer day. I also liked the fact that, at a point where my own 16th birthday was only a few weeks away, the lead singer on this top hit record was 16 at the time, which encouraged the idea in my mind that my own band could likewise achieve the kind of fame that The Box Tops had, with young age not being an impediment to success. The Initials never did take off the way The Box Tops did, but then, we didn’t start out by demanding a ticket for an aer-o-plane, and perhaps we should have.

Sunday, July 24, 2016

Give It a Shot

Song 313: This week the playlist comes around to Hit Me With Your Best Shot by Pat Benatar, written by Eddie Schwartz. This week’s track provides a major contrast with last week’s cut, going from a recording that broke new musical ground, opened up new musical possibilities and featured poetic lyrics with layers of meaning, to a 45 in the love category that’s about a simple as a song can get. When this single hit the airwaves about 11 years after last week’s track, it didn’t create the kind of expectations for Pat Benatar that King Crimson’s debut did for them, and no one expected her to do much more than make some fun records, but she certainly did do that, with this hit being the one that first got her some major recognition, though it was actually from her second LP. I’ll admit that I didn’t get too impressed when I started hearing it on the radio, but I did notice after a while that I didn’t get tired of it the way I often did with other radio hits, and over time I got to liking it more. Don’t look for any deep shades of meaning in the words, because you won’t find any, but if you want a few short minutes of simple rock and roll fun, Pat’s first top-tenner will hit you with her best shot, or at least one of them.

Sunday, July 17, 2016

A Regal Location

Song 312: This week on the playlist you’ll find The Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson, written by Ian McDonald and Peter Sinfield. Not long after I arrived at Northwestern in the fall of 1969, King Crimson arrived on the radio with their first album, for which this was essentially the title track. The LP sounded totally different from anything that had come along before, incorporating elements of classical music and jazz in ways that no one had ever thought of, so it attracted a lot of attention, and justifiably so. The Who’s Pete Townshend called the record “an uncanny masterpiece” and during the year that followed its release, plenty of listeners made it quite clear how significant they felt the album was. At that point in my career, feeling the need to transition away from the top-40 style that I had previously evolved from my HS listening choices, I searched for a more serious and original personal singer/songwriter approach, and King Crimson’s debut came along at just the right time, showing me a way to blend in some of the classical influences that I had learned in my younger days, having played violin for the orchestra. Over the next couple of years, I would put that classical influence to good use in composing tracks such as Shake the Dust, Ghost of a Chance, Fly So Free and a few others. While In the Court of the Crimson King seemed to open up new possibilities, very few records in the progressive rock genre would come close to reaching the high bar King Crimson had set on their debut, with Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon being the one notable exception. If you’d like to get some idea of the direction I took after being inspired by this influence, you can hear Shake the Dust here.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Old News to Keep On Rockin’ To

Song 311: This week on the playlist you’ll find Drugs in the White House by Bob Nichols, who also wrote the song. Seven weeks after posting a track by my friend Jeff Larson, this week’s cut is by my late friend and former Berkeley housemate Bob Nichols, who died back in November of 2005. I was there at People’s Park in Berkeley on the day in 1980 when Bob did this performance, accompanied by a few friends, although at this point I no longer remember who the other players were. Bob made no secret of his advocacy for a chemically-enhanced lifestyle, and in the opening (and title) line of this recording, he celebrates the story that then-current President Jimmie Carter had a top advisor who admitted to having indulged in marijuana, possibly in the company of Mr. Carter. Bob was also a strong advocate for the homeless, who he helped in his community in quite a few extraordinary ways (check out his obituary), plus he was a strong advocate for People’s Park, so it’s fitting that he made one of his best recordings by performing live there. I do sometimes miss my old friend and former housemate, and I continue to listen to his music quite a bit. Over the years, his line “We are filling our lives with too much jive” has often come to mind, particularly at moments when I feel myself getting overloaded with stuff. In his chorus, Bob vows to keep on rockin’ no matter what happens, but while he obviously can’t do that any more, some of us can keep on rockin’ for him, while listening to his rockin’ recordings.

Sunday, July 3, 2016

Where She Came From

Song 310: This week's playlist track can tell you about My Tennessee Mountain Home by Dolly Parton, who also wrote the song. The first version I heard of this piece was from Maria Muldaur’s debut solo album, which, by the summer of 1974, about a year after its release, had become one of my favorites, with lots of spins on the turntable. Coming from a country background, I had found the Chicago area oppressively urban, and I enjoyed hearing the colorful detailed descriptions of Dolly’s mountain home. I had noticed her name on the songwriting credits for this title, and I think I knew a little bit about who she was, but then in that summer of ’74, her career came into much sharper focus with a hit called Jolene and another called I Will Always Love You, which would soon appear on one of my favorite Linda Ronstadt LPs. Dolly had a few more hits in the next couple of years that I really liked, including The Bargain Store and her first million-seller, Here You Come Again. She continued doing well on the charts for the next couple of decades, even expanding her career to act in movies, and in this year of 2016, at the age of 70, she actively persists with touring and recording, having released her 42nd studio album in 2014. Dolly has covered quite a lot of ground since leaving her Tennessee mountain home, but she still seems to carry that inspiration that she picked up as a child, watching and listening as a songbird on a fence post sings a melody. On a side note, this track is a third sly reference to the second verse of my own song As Long as Merle is Still Haggard, which begins with the line Should Patty Loveless when Wynonna, she’s Judd fine and Dolly, beg your Parton, puts up a good front (?) You can find the As Long as Merle is Still Haggard video here.

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Don’t Keep It a Secret

Song 309: This week the playlist comes around to Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out) by The Hombres, written by Jerry Masters, Gary McEwen, B. B. Cunningham and John Hunter (the four band members). Again this week, last week’s cut leads to another, this time due to the lyric. In After Midnight, J. J. Cale sings the line “After midnight, we’re going to let it all hang out” a lot, so this track seemed like a good follow-up. I thought perhaps one lyric might have owed something to the other, since they both originated in roughly the same era, but I could find no clear indication of that. When this single showed up in the fall of my junior year at HS, a few of my friends used it as yet another occasion to make fun of me for how unhip I was, because I initially felt that the title phrase had sexual connotations. “Oh, you don’t know what it means,” they laughingly said to me, and, during that fundamentalist Christian phase of my life, I found it a bit reassuring to believe that the song wasn’t a sly sexual reference, although I liked plenty of other records that did have such hints. Somehow I never managed to clearly hear the spoken intro during the 45’s chart run, and I’m sure that if I had, that would have bothered me too, but a few years later, free of the fundamentalist constraints and able to collect old favorites, I added this one to the collection, and the first spin on the turntable, the intro really made me smile, at a moment in my life where I could freely appreciate the temptations of Eve rather than fear them. By then, I understood that my HS friends had been playing with me when they insisted that the phrase had no sexual overtones, but I also had grasped the other nuances of it as well, so I felt like I too could let it all hang out.

Sunday, June 19, 2016

Time for a Good TIme

Song 308: This week on the playlist you can hear the song After Midnight by JJ Cale, who also wrote the song. It seemed appropriate to follow last week’s post of a track by the King of the Slide Guitar Elmore James with another cut that features slide guitar, although this one does so in a much more laid back manner. After my 1971 summer in Atlanta, when I discovered the music of the Allman Brothers, quickly developed an appreciation of Duane Allman’s slide guitar wizardry, and even made a vain attempt at sliding up and down a guitar fretboard, the following summer, this record started lighting up the airwaves. My failed attempts at playing slide guitar had deepened my appreciation of the technique, and of the musicians who had mastered it, so for me, this track came along at exactly the right time. Little did I know then that JJ had released the song as a single 6 years earlier, and I had also missed Eric Clapton’s hit version from 1970. It was actually Clapton’s hit that prompted Cale to re-record the piece and include it as part of a complete album called Naturally. Not long after this single appeared, Naturally I added the LP to my collection, and it spent plenty of time spinning on my turntable. Sadly, JJ died of a heart attack about 3 years ago, in July of 2013, at the age of 74, so even After Midnight these days, he’s not gonna cause talk and suspicion any more, but maybe once in a while some of the rest of us can, and we can occasionally think of him and the inspiration he provided for doing so.

Monday, June 13, 2016

Cleaning Up

Song 307: This week the playlist comes around to Dust My Broom by Elmore James, written by Robert Johnson. After I started writing songs, at the age of 14, I soon became acquainted with the 1-4-5 12-bar blues song structure, though I didn’t know that it had originated in a genre called blues, and I didn’t even know about the existence of that genre. Not long into my freshman year at Northwestern, in the fall of ’69, I found myself hanging out with a few other dorm mates in another fellow student’s room as he played some blues records and talked about how much he liked that genre. This first encounter with the blues did not impress me, because all the records he played circled around that same 12-bar blues formula, so I thought that many of them sounded alike. Not long after that, though, one of the guys from the room across the hall showed off his blues-flavored piano improvisational style, and in doing so, he opened up a whole new world of musical possibility for me, inspiring me to explore my own bluesy piano improvisations. Concurrently, as I listened to a lot more of the rock and roll music I had already grown to love, and I could finally buy at least some of the LPs I had always wanted, plus I had a subscription to Rolling Stone, I began to learn more about the roots of that RnR music, and how much of RnR could be traced back to blues. I spent the summer of ’71 in Atlanta, GA, and there I discovered local heroes The Allman Brothers, quickly tuning in to Duane Allman’s outstanding slide guitar wizardry. That summer I tried fiddling with a slide, but I felt so inept in the initial attempts that I wouldn’t even consider another try for almost 2 decades. That first vain attempt did increase my appreciation of slide guitar, however, and in that context, as the name Elmore James kept coming up, when I started hearing his records, I immediately understood the important role EJ had played in creating the musical foundation for later RnR players. Fast forward only a few years, and around ’76, I played piano for a one week gig in Chicago with a band led by EJ’s cousin Homesick James that included Snooky Pryor on drums, so I guess that by then, I had paid enough of my dues that I could at least play the blues, even if it would be well over 10 years before I would again try to slide along a guitar fretboard.

Sunday, June 5, 2016

Destiny and Destination

Song 306: This week’s playlist track is Born to Be Wild by Steppenwolf, written by Mars Bonfire. In the summer of ’68, before my senior year at HS, I had started working on a film project, along with a few friends, and later that fall a group of us would form our high school’s first official film club. I had written a script for a sort of Man from Uncle-style spy movie, and one day my group managed to get permission to film in part of the high school. The scene would include a rock-and-roll band playing on the auditorium stage, and one of my friends had agreed to act as the guitar player for the band. I suggested a couple of cuts for him to play, and he said, “We should do some newer songs instead.” He started with Break on Through, which I of course already knew, but after that, he played a newer track that I didn’t recognize, which was a riff tune built around an E chord riff that moved from the 5th tone to the 6th, and then to the 7th. Hearing the guitar alone, I thought the riff seemed very simple, and I wasn’t sure it could support a whole song, but then, a week or 2 later, I heard the new Steppenwolf 45, and it quickly erased any doubts I might have had. In fact, having heard the guitar riff before hearing the actual single made the record sound even more impressive for the way the band crafted such a rocking classic around that simple riff. This one, like their follow-up single The Pusher (Song 202), would create some internal conflicts for me as I struggled with a religious background that viewed the devil’s music as a dangerous influence, because these cuts seemed to embrace the dark side of human nature that my parents kept warning me about, but by the time, 2 years later, that I heard this track as a golden oldie in the opening sequence of Easy Rider, I could enjoy it without guilt, just as I had enjoyed the motorcycle ride my cousin gave me in the summer of ’66 (see Not Everyone’s Favorite Day post from 5/8/16). For many years I dreamed of the moment when I too would head out on the highway on a motorcycle of my own, but at some point that dream lost its appeal, and these days, I’d rather listen to this track on the CD player inside a 4-wheel vehicle when I’m racin’ with the wind along the 2-lane or 4-lane blacktop and concrete.

Sunday, May 29, 2016

Facts You Might Not Want to Know

Song 305: This week on the playlist you can have fun hearing Facts About Cats by Timbuk3, written by Pat MacDonald. The YouTube video here has some truly entertaining segments featuring cats wearing headphones, and if you like cats, then you’ll surely enjoy the video. It seemed appropriate to follow up last week’s post of a song by my friend Jeff Larson with a Timbuk3 track because it was Jeff who introduced me to their music. Not long after their debut album Greetings from Timbuk3 appeared, he played it for me a time or 2, and that soon moved me to get my own copy. While I liked the whole record, this cut moved me the most, and before too long I knew the words by heart. Listening to it often reminds me of the moment in my life when I became aware of the fact that cats eat birds. During my childhood, my family refused to have any cats or dogs, and I guessed, from bits and pieces that I picked up, that the grandparents had had either a cat or a dog at our house that had come to a sad end, evidently by a car hitting it, so they apparently did not want to chance that possibility again. This being the case, whatever I learned about dogs and cats during visits with acquaintances who had them, I also missed knowing a few of the basics. I got my first 2 kittens in 1972, living in Evanston, and a week or 2 later, getting up one morning, I saw sister Guinevere sitting all alone, with her brother Joker nowhere in sight. I had seen both kittens taking turns climbing into the fireplace flue, but from a 2nd floor apartment occupying a 3-story building, I didn’t know if Joker could have made that long climb to the roof, although I could see no other way out of the apartment. I mentioned to the upstairs neighbor that a kitten had gone missing, and within minutes, she came down to tell me she heard what sounded like a cat crying on the roof, so I climbed up to the access hatch, I lifted it, and sure enough, there he was. Moving to Atlanta in the spring of ’74, I found an apartment on a side street with little traffic where it seemed safe enough to allow the 2 felines to roam freely outside — something too risky to do in Evanston. I felt good about the move to Atlanta, and one of the first positive changes that I noticed was hearing the birds singing, which I had never heard in Evanston. Then one day, as I sat on the porch strumming my guitar, with Joker hanging out nearby, a couple of birds flew by just under the porch ceiling, and as they did so, our boy jumped up and made threatening gestures towards them. A few days later, Joker came to the door and tried to proudly present a gift in the form of a bird carcass. During the months in Atlanta, Joker would try many times to present gifts that I didn’t want to accept, and while it didn’t make me love him any less, it did teach me a few Facts About Cats that I probably would have rather not known.

Sunday, May 22, 2016

Can’t See Her Clearly From Here

Song 304: Seven weeks after my last personal friend song post, this week on the playlist you can hear A Faraway Girl by my friend Jeff Larson, who also wrote the song. I can make a claim to having inspired the original version of this piece, as Jeff watched me struggle with an obsession over a woman who did not have similar feelings about me. He and I would often get together to trade riffs and share our most recent writings, and in the process of doing so, he heard several new compositions I wrote about this woman, and some of the details in between the lines. His first rendition of this cut basically just stitched together his observations of my vain and seemingly-endless efforts to get closer to A Faraway Girl. After wasting way too much time trying to reach the unreachable star, I eventually gave up the fool’s quest, and over the intervening decades, Jeff’s tune evolved in a bit of a different direction, perhaps picking up pieces of his own experiences along the way. Incidentally, among the songs that I wrote for A Faraway Girl back in the early ‘80s is one from Who Said What that I posted a lyric video of in late April, called Song of the Wood

Sunday, May 15, 2016

Sounds Like Spring

Song 303: This week on the playlist you can hear the sound of Green Grass by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, written by Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway. This song is a companion to last week’s track Monday, Monday by The Mamas and The Papas. I heard both of them on a bus day trip to the Bronx Zoo with a bunch of my classmates 50 years ago, in May of 1966, and whenever I hear this one, the first image that comes to mind is of a spot on the NYS Thruway in the Bronx, climbing the hill on the northbound side, on a bright, sunshiny spring afternoon. It felt very good to be alive at that moment, and this cut seemed to encapsulate the moment perfectly, even though, unlike the lyric of the song, I had no lover by my side. As I mentioned last week, the music I heard on that bus ride in May of ’66 sounded so good to me that I gave up any further attempts to resist rock and roll, despite whatever my family might have believed about it being the devil’s music and threatening my soul. My friend Brian and I discussed plans for a band of our own, my mother bought me an acoustic guitar not long after the beginning of the summer break, and I started writing songs as soon as I got that guitar. On a car ride soon after, heading up to visit relatives in Syracuse, I sang and played a few of my new songs in the back seat, and told my parents, who were sitting in the front seat, that I had written them. My mother, sitting on the passenger side, gave me a small smile and said, “That’s nice,” but my father, who was driving, frowned, and he said, “It sounds just like that junk they play on WENE.” (WENE was, of course, our local top-40 radio station.) I would bet that he had no idea how good it made me feel, hearing him say that, because that’s exactly how I wanted my songs to sound. I managed to snag a couple of Gary Lewis 45s during my HS days, though I don’t think I had this one in my small collection, but one of my good friends had the GL greatest hits package that included it, and when I visited him, I would often ask him to spin that LP while we played pool in the family’s basement, so this track brightened every spring of my HS career. Gary Lewis is, BTW, the son of famous comedian Jerry Lewis.

Sunday, May 8, 2016

Not Everyone’s Favorite Day

Song 302: This week the playlist comes around to Monday, Monday by The Mamas and The Papas, written by John Phillips. 50 years ago, in May of 1966, near the end of my HS freshman year, I took a bus ride to NYC with a bunch of my classmates, on a day trip to the Bronx Zoo. My friends and I had a really fun day at the zoo, but for me, the best and most memorable part of the trip was the music on the radio, which included this cut. Since the Beatles rocked my world a couple of years earlier, I had struggled to justify my enjoyment of music that my religious family believed was of the devil. I would at times righteously resolve to turn my back on rock and roll, but the resolve would quickly crumble when my ears detected some magic sounds from a nearby transistor radio. That May day when I first heard this song, I liked it so much that it totally destroyed any possibility of resistance — if RnR could sound this good, I couldn’t resist, no matter how much the heavenly father, and my earthly one, might want me to do so. I mistakenly thought at first that the background singers at the beginning were singing “Bow down” and it made me wonder whether a devil-worship subtext might lurk in the recording, but if they wanted me to bow down, I would have to do it. My friend Brian had already discussed the idea of forming a band, and not long after the school year ended, my mother bought me an acoustic guitar. I wrote 8 songs in my first week with the instrument, composing a new one every time I learned a new chord. That summer we also did our visit to my father’s Ohio relatives — I mentioned in last week’s post about a Hank Williams track that in my younger years we made the drive every summer, but then in the ‘60s the family decided to only do alternate years, making the trip on the even-numbered ones. During that Ohio visit in the summer of 1966, as usual, we spent one night with my father’s brother’s family, but this time around, their house had changed dramatically. Previously, for as long as I could remember, the family had lived in a finished basement, presumably built by my father’s brother, but when we visited in ’66, the man had constructed a handsome 2-story house on top of that basement — the house that had been envisioned and promised for well over a decade had finally risen. Hanging out with my cousin in his fancy new bedroom, he soon put If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears on the stereo. I felt the LP lived up to its name, sounding unbelievably good, and I had no doubt that my cousin felt the same way. The next day, he would give me my first motorcycle ride, making the visit even better. Having become a major MnP fan, I would have loved to own their debut album, but my system for smuggling records into the family home was limited to singles, so I picked up whatever MnP 45s I could manage, including this one, and they spent plenty of time spinning on my little turntable in the basement. One other memory I have of this cut happened near the end of my HS sophomore year, when the disc from the previous spring had become ancient history according to the radio standards of the era, When I heard it playing on a radio at school, the version seemed much shorter than normal, and one of my classmates told me the local station would sometimes do a mini-spin on oldies. Even that short, edited-down model sounded very good to me, and to my ears, this track never lost its magic, so it surprised me decades later to read that the other members of the group had opposed Papa John’s idea of releasing it as a single, and they had not expected it to take off the way it did. To me, Monday, Monday was a perfect 45, and perhaps the perfect 45, from the first time I heard it, 50 years ago.

Sunday, May 1, 2016

How to Spend Some Time (and Money)

Song 301: This week on the playlist, it’s a good time for Honky Tonkin’ by Hank Williams, who also wrote the song. I don’t know how I managed to get past the 300 mark on this list before including a Hank Sr. track, but realizing that I had neglected him, this seemed like the right week to make up for that lapse. During my early childhood, my parents and grandparents made a yearly visit every summer to my father’s relatives in western Ohio, and by the age of 7 or so I had gotten acquainted with the relative family’s country music album collection and their stereo record player, to the point that my aunt and uncle felt totally at ease with letting me choose and play whatever LPs I wanted to hear, knowing that they could trust me to handle both the records and the equipment with appropriate care, and also with some genuine affection. I listened to a lot of Hank Sr., along with other major country talents like Patsy Cline and Roy Acuff, and got to know many of those songs by heart, including this one. Growing up in a very religious home where alcohol and cigarettes did not intrude, and bars were thought of as dens of iniquity, I didn’t exactly know what to picture when Hank sang about honky tonkin’, and I also thought it a bit odd, from the male-centered perspective of the era, that he expected the woman to bring along some dough, but I never let any of that hinder my enjoyment of his performance. I didn’t know if I would have enjoyed honky tonkin’ with Hank, but I always had a good time hearing him sing about it.

Sunday, April 24, 2016

A Very Suggestive Name

Song 300: The week the playlist can introduce you to Peter Gunn by Henry Mancini, who also wrote the song. This track follows last week’s Pink Cadillac by Bruce Springsteen as a way to provide some context for my statement that the Springsteen cut probably owes its inspiration to this one from Mancini, and it very likely won’t take more than a few seconds to make the connection clear. This song was the theme music for the TV show of the same name, and the record appeared in 1959 as the opening track of the album The Music from Peter Gunn. I know that as a kid I never watched the Peter Gunn TV show because our antenna didn’t pick up NBC, but I did manage to hear this song many times, quite possibly in the form of the Ray Anthony version or the Duane Eddy model, since they both scored hits with this piece around the turn of the ‘60s. While much of Mancini’s work found its inspiration in jazz, and garnered its audience from the easy listening segment of the dial, this cut clearly owes its roots to rock and roll, and nearly 6 decades after it first hit the airwaves, it can still get my feet tapping to the beat pretty quickly, and I would bet that Bruce feels the same way.

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Good Ride

Song 299: This week on the playlist you can ride Pink Cadillac by Bruce Springsteen, who also wrote the song. Bruce makes the playlist this week because I’d like to honor him for taking a stand against NC’s new anti-LGBT law — he cancelled a concert scheduled for last Sunday, 4/10, in Greensboro, with apologies to his fans, as a way for him and his band to show support for the LGBT community of NC, and to express opposition to the new state law there that attacks the rights of its LGBT citizens. Back in ’84, this cut rolled out as the B-side of the lead single from Born in the U.S.A., and along with that entire album, I felt it clearly showed that Springsteen had finally hit his stride. As good as his first few records were, it seemed to me that they always hinted at a greater potential, and in 1984, Bruce at last connected with that earlier promise. The main riff that he built this song around quite probably owes its inspiration to the Mancini Peter Gunn theme from 1959, but from that starting point, The Boss moves the licks along through some very interesting territory. His lyrics, and the way he delivers them, also suggest that possibly he actually has something else in mind other than just riding in a car, but even if he’s tempting somebody into doing something they know is wrong, when it sounds this good, anyone would want to know what it feels like in the back of that Pink Cadillac.

Monday, April 11, 2016

Won’t See Him There Any More

Song 298: This week on the playlist I’m posting the Merle Haggard track Swinging Doors (which he wrote) as a tribute to one of country music’s most important figures, because, sadly, he had to leave country music last Wednesday, on the date of his 79th birthday, 4/6/16. I would rank this as my second favorite Merle cut, closely following Mama Tried (Song 191). I don’t remember the first time I heard it, but if there’s any truth to the rumor about me performing with a country bar pickup band in the East Bay during the 1980s, that band might have included this song during a set on any given night, and the first time we played it, I already knew it well, and felt as if I’d always known it. I read a few articles in Rolling Stone in the ‘70s that made a point about Merle being the real deal, as someone who had actually lived the life he wrote about in his songs, including spending time behind bars, although, fortunately for us all, when he turned 21 in prison he wasn’t really doing life without parole, but actually just a couple of years, because he hadn’t killed anyone — he had only committed a botched burglary. During his time in San Quentin, he got to see a Johnny Cash show there, and that show inspired him to take a much better direction when he got out of jail. In the early ‘90s, I usually tried to make the weekly songwriter’s gathering at Jack Hardy’s place on Houston St., and the group basically tuned in to only new material, so I tried to come up with a new song every week for the meeting. One particular week, I still hadn’t written anything by the day before the gathering, and as I desperately tried to come up with a lyric idea, my mind wandered into thinking about Merle, and how his last name couldn’t have been more perfect for him and his role in country music. I thought of the line As long as Merle is still Haggard I guess country music will do all right and from there, I suddenly had a concept for a song about puns of country singers’ names. I finished it before the meeting, and when I played it for the group, Richard Julian (see Song 283) looked at me and said, “That song could be a hit in Nashville.” So far that hasn’t happened, but later in the decade, I did get to see Merle perform in a small (but packed) club in Manhattan, not once, but twice, and I felt like country music was doing all right then. I can’t say how country music will fare following Merle’s death, but at least Willie is still willin’ and Charley still has his Pride. You can find the As Long as Merle is Still Haggard video here.

Sunday, April 3, 2016

A Leading Cause of Grey Hair

Song 297: For this week’s playlist track you can hear Daddy Turned Grey by John Sonntag, who also wrote the song. Seven weeks after my last post of a song by a personal friend, this week’s cut is by my friend John Sonntag. I mentioned him in my post 2 weeks ago (Song 295 — Car Wheels on a Gravel Road) because he was the one who introduced me to the music of Lucinda Williams, and in the same era that he did that, I also heard him perform this song, which I really liked. The lyrics paint a very clear picture of a town betrayed by the management class and robbed of its industrial employment base. I know John comes from the Pittsburgh area, and though I never actually spoke with him about his family’s history, I would bet this track tells a true story, and that his father probably worked in the steel mills there when he was growing up. This betrayal of the working class by upper management has repeated itself over the last few decades for far too many times to even keep score, and in almost every case, as the workers and their town turned grey overnight, those upper management types, strangely enough, they’re doing well, if not very, very, very well. I wrote a song similar to this one, about the same topic, using the former steel town of Bethlehem, PA, as my inspiration, because I’ve spent a lot of time there, being quite fond of the Godfrey Daniels Coffeehouse, and over the years, on my visits, I picked up a lot of clues from the scenery, leading to a track that I called Cold Company Town, which you can listen to here.

Sunday, March 27, 2016

Try and Follow

Song 296: This week on the playlist you can hear that Wild One by Thin Lizzy, written by Phil Lynott. When the Irish band Thin Lizzy hit the radio and the charts in the summer of ’76 with their one and only major U.S. hit The Boys Are Back in Town, I found it a bit disappointing. While it wasn’t a bad song, it sounded to me like a step down from the quality of their previous album Fighting that had come along the year before. I had heard Wild One a few times on a Chicago-area radio station from the far suburbs that played a lot of cool stuff not heard on the major stations, and that convinced me to take a chance on the LP, which turned out to be a very good investment that I often listened to from the first cut on side one to the last groove on side two. I guarantee that if this list gets long enough, Spirit Slips Away will appear on it someday, and possibly one or two other tracks from the album. The band’s name, by the way, is a clever takeoff on the old school term Tin Lizzie, which was the nickname for the Ford Model T that I heard my grandparents mention quite a few times. Phil Lynott, who played bass, sang lead, acted as frontman and wrote most of the band’s songs, including this one, was the first black Irishman to achieve commercial success in rock music, and sadly, he died in early 1986 at the age of 36. I sometimes wonder if the Wild One Phil sang about in this cut might have acted a bit like the Crazy Ones (Song 285) that John Mellencamp sang about, and maybe if Phil had lived a few years longer, rather than singing “So you go your way, wild one — I’ll try and follow” he might have ended up singing “So you go your way, wild one — there’s no way I could follow” instead.

Sunday, March 20, 2016

I Recognize That Sound

Song 295: This week on the playlist you can hear the sound of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams, who also wrote the song. My good friend and fellow singer/songwriter John Sonntag introduced me to the music of Lucinda Williams in the fall of 1991 — he played me her debut CD, and I thought it sounded pretty good. When a new LW CD appeared in the summer of 1998 that featured this cut as its title track, I thought it sounded even better, and since adding the disc to my collection, it has taken a spin on my various players many times. I usually enjoy the entire CD, but this track in particular always brings multiple images to mind, making me feel as if I’m taking that car ride along a gravel road, even when I’m actually cruising down some 4-lane blacktop. While a few of the song’s phrases refer specifically to southern scenes, most of the passing sights and sounds could easily find a place in a working-class country view from a northern setting. I know that I heard a lot of these same remarks from my parents and grandparents, though on the first line of the second verse, one of them would have used the word darn instead of damn, with a touch of religious guilt attached, but otherwise, I well remember that low hum of voices in the front seat, and, as someone who often caught the sound of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road while growing up, I can tell you that this cut is exactly what those tires sound like as they’re rolling over those tiny little stones.

Sunday, March 13, 2016

Got a Match?

Song 294: The playlist track for this week is that Matchbox by Carl Perkins, who also wrote the song. Before the Beatles rocked my world in February of 1964, I knew nothing about rock and roll, so of course, the first version of this song that I learned was the Beatles recording of it. From the very beginning of my interest in records, though, I always took note of songwriter names, so at some point, when I had the chance to read the label of Something New, I noticed that someone named Carl Perkins had actually written this particular favorite. I slowly came to understand that an earlier generation of rock and rollers had preceded the Fab Four, and I began to learn more about their influences when I got my hands on their official biography during my senior year. Fast forward a couple of years, and with the ‘50s RnR revival of the early ‘70s, I started hearing a lot of vintage Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and others, giving me a clearer idea of how Carl Perkins also fit into that mix in a significant way. Very early in my own guitar experience, I figured out how to play this tune, and it became part of my standard cover repertoire, which would have come in quite handy if there’s any truth to the rumor of my membership in a country-bar pickup band slouching around the East Bay club scene in the 1980s, as this song would have been that band’s usual opener. In researching the original recording, I learned that Jerry Lee Lewis played piano on the track, accompanied by Carl’s older brother Jay (James Buck) Perkins on acoustic guitar and his younger brother Lloyd Carter Perkins on bass. I also found out that on the same day the group recorded this cut, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley dropped by the studio later and jammed along with Carl and the band. Matchbox originally arrived as the B-side of the Your True Love single, and at the time only the A-side charted, although the B-side would later become much more well-known. The lyrics to verse 1 of Carl’s track appeared earlier on discs from the 1920s by Ma Rainey and Blind Lemon Jefferson, though no one knows now if either of them originated the lines or pulled the words from traditional sources, but even if everything else Carl ever did was wrong, this cut turned out quite all right, as, in fact, a bunch of his other ones did too, so possibly a few of them might appear on this list at different points in the future.

Sunday, March 6, 2016

You Can Bet on Him

Song 293: This week the playlist can introduce you to that Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man by the Bob Seger System, written by Bob Seger. Just as with the YT video for Midnight Confessions that I wrote about two weeks ago, the YT video linked to this track comes from a 1960s TV appearance by the artists, and so, once again, the performance sounds exactly like the record, which means that the band was basically going through the motions for the camera, miming to the recording. Last week I posted a Glen Frey song as a small tribute to him, having recently learned that he died on January 16th of this year, and in researching for that post, I learned that Glen’s first studio experience happened on this single, for which he played acoustic guitar and sang backup vocals for his friend Bob Seger. I missed this one during its initial chart run, when it peaked in January of 1969, but I got to know it very well in the summer of 1974. Seger at the time could fill a stadium in the area of his home town of Detroit, but was basically a club act in Chicago and other nearby cities. I happened to pass by Detroit a half-dozen times in that summer, traveling between Chicago and Windsor, Canada, and with the car radio on, I heard this cut from the Detroit rock station on every trip. I made those runs that summer out of necessity, and I did not enjoy the rides very much, but hearing this song on the way always made me feel better about the journey. In fact, back then, you couldn’t drive by Detroit while tuned in to the local rock station and not hear this track, and that was a good thing — a very good thing. I soon added this record to my collection, and when, a couple of years later, Mr. Seger reappeared with a new album called Night Moves that rocked up the airwaves, I felt as if I’d always known that he would make the big time at some point, and that he deserved to do so, because even if he wasn’t good lookin’, he also wasn’t shy, and he wasn’t afraid to look a girl (or the entire audience) in the eye.

Sunday, February 28, 2016

Deadly Business

Song 292: This week on the playlist you can hear Smuggler’s Blues by Glenn Frey, written by Glenn Frey and Jack Tempchin. I wanted to post a Glenn Frey track on the playlist today as a sort of small tribute to him because of his recent death, which I only learned about over the last 2 weeks, though he died about 6 weeks ago, on January 16th. I had mixed feelings about much of the Eagles work — some of their songs I really liked, and others I didn’t care to ever hear again once they had finished their initial radio run. After the Eagles broke up in 1980, I had no particular expectations for the individual members, so when this cut came along a few years later, it totally took me by surprise, and it quickly became a favorite. I felt it encapsulated a very real concern of the time, and did so to the accompaniment of some very impressive slide guitar riffs. Unfortunately, this song has lost none of its relevance over the last 3 decades, and until we end the authoritarian War on Drugs, the unnecessary violence and mass incarcerations will continue, with the U.S. taxpayers footing a bill that now exceeds $1.5 trillion.

Sunday, February 21, 2016

I Confess, or Maybe I Don’t

Song 291: This week on the playlist you can hear Midnight Confessions by The Grass Roots, written by Lou Josie. You might notice that the linked video (on the daveelder.com home page) of the band performing on a TV show sounds exactly like the record, and you’ll also hear the sound of a horn section in some places, though you don’t see any brass players onstage with the band. While it’s possible that a TV show could have a horn section playing along in a pit next to the stage, it’s not possible that a live ensemble could sound exactly like a record, especially back in that era, and most certainly when the sound includes a horn section coupled with a typical RnR instrumental quartet. Without question, the band was lip-syncing to the record here, but they do so in a truly entertaining way. This hit song from the summer of ’68 seemed like a good track to post for this week since my political blog for the week (at Politics 106 or on Daily Kos as DaveElder) concerns a confession that I’m making about the election season of 1968, which roughly corresponds with the time this cut graced the airwaves. The single peaked just as summer turned to fall, not long after I began my senior year at HS, and the varsity football team that included a handful of my classmates began what would end up being its second undefeated season in a row, and probably its last one ever. Before one of those Friday night home games, I spent some time sitting in a car parked next to the bleachers, talking with a girl who I really wanted to talk with, though the conversation did not go the way I had hoped. The radio played during our chat, and at an awkward moment this cut offered some welcome relief to an otherwise heavy silence. As much as I liked the track, I didn’t learn all the words until a couple of years later when I owned the record, and then I realized that the singer is confessing to loving a woman in his social circle who wears a little gold ring on her hand. I always enjoyed the musical bit near the end where all the other players drop out, and the singer delivers his line backed up only by the organ, which slyly hints at a kind of holy confession. While I had wanted to confess to the young woman in the car before the football game that I loved her, I didn’t  confess anything, but it would take some more time before I finally understood that, like the singer in the song, I too was wasting my time. She inspired lots of songs, and on my YouTube channel, I have referred to her as Ms. Yellow Shoes, alluding specifically to one of those songs.

Sunday, February 14, 2016

Valentine’s Day Card

Song 290: Seven weeks after my last personal friend song post, this week on the playlist you can hear I Was a Loner by my friend Monty Delaney, who also wrote the piece. I met Monty one Thursday night at the songwriters’ gathering at Jack Hardy’s apartment on Houston Street in Manhattan. His debut in that circle made a distinct impression, and during the era when I frequented that conclave, I heard him sing a number of memorable tunes, including this one, and also “I Was Not a Victim, I Was a Volunteer” which he performs on the Town Crier live video link (at daveelder.com) after he plays this song. Today being Valentine’s Day, it seemed appropriate to feature Monty’s touching love song for his wife, especially in light of the fact that less than 2 weeks ago, his 4th grandchild arrived. I reconnected with Monty on Facebook a couple of years ago, and I truly appreciate the way that social media platform provides a simple and easy way to locate old friends that I haven’t had any contact with for a decade or longer, and to share some of the ups and downs of their current lives. I offered my congratulations to Monty on the happy occasion of his grandson’s birth, as it adds another layer of meaning to this song that he wrote long ago for the woman who made his family life a reality.

Sunday, February 7, 2016

What to Do With an Empty Glass

Song 289: This week on the playlist you can hear Let Go by From Good Homes, written by Todd Sheaffer. It’s only been 6 weeks since my last personal friend song post, so this isn’t one of those, but I almost had the chance to meet Todd Sheaffer, who wrote this song, and if I had gotten to meet him, perhaps he might have become a very good friend of mine. Back in the early '90s, Todd came to one of the Thursday night gatherings at Jack Hardy’s Houston St. apartment, and he played a couple of songs for Jack before the regular festivities got started, but then he had to leave early. I got the impression that he and Jack knew each other well, and that he may have been a more frequent guest in the era before I started making that scene. Anyway, I knew who he was, having heard him perform with his band From Good Homes at the folkie MacDougal St. club that a bunch of us singer/songwriter types frequented in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I liked quite a few of the songs on the band’s set list, but from the first time I heard it, this track moved me the most. It took a few years before it finally made it to CD, but once it did, I made sure to get a copy, and not long after, I made it the opening cut on a personal favorites CD, around the time when CD burners became an affordable home appliance. One day when I had that personal favorites CD spinning on the player, a friend remarked on how this track reminded him of Satisfaction, with the singer singing “let go” instead of “I can’t get no.” I could hear the similarity that he was pointing out, but I didn’t hear as close a connection as he did, and nothing about that similarity did anything to dampen my satisfaction with this cut, which I continued to enjoy as my 90s Faves 1 CD later gave birth to a playlist that still graces my iPod. While the track doesn’t really break any new musical or lyrical ground, it conveys such a quality of perfection, from the lead solo to the basic rocking recorded sound to the clever lyrical turns of phrase, that it feels like this is as good as it gets. I could wish that all of my recordings would sound this good, but that might be a hard dream to hold onto, and I might have to Let Go.

Sunday, January 31, 2016

Take the Stairs

Song 288: The honor of being this week’s playlist track goes to Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin, written by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. While I liked a lot of LZ’s first 3 LPs, I felt that somehow they hadn’t yet painted that musical masterpiece that lurked somewhere in the soul of the band. Then in the late fall of ’71 came word about a new Zeppelin record soon to rock the airwaves, and on the day of its official release, I caught the beginning of one of the tracks on my radio that immediately grabbed my attention. The opening riff had a bit of a different sound from their earlier work, but it sounded good, and when Robert Plant’s voice came across, I knew it was a cut from the new disc. The track sounded similar to the earlier LPs, but better and clearer, and as the song went on, it continued to build, getting stronger and heavier, in a way that carried the listener along for an unforgettable ride. Instead of following the usual verse to chorus structure of almost every other song in prevailing musical genres, from rock to country to pop to soul, this new track moved linearly, from the mellow folky opening section to the heavy rocking climax, in a way that felt musically consistent, as it fully developed every musical thread on its journey. Soon, everyone was talking about this incredible new Zeppelin song, which, despite its 8-minute length, started conquering not only FM radio but the AM dial as well. Sometimes AM stations would cheat by playing shortened and sped-up versions, but with the smaller playlists that dominated radio in that era, inevitably, it became too much of a good thing. I can remember, about 6 months after the song’s release, wondering if I’d ever choose to want to hear it again, given how I couldn’t escape hearing it, even in the grocery store or walking down the street. Going on into the late ‘70s, when I rarely if ever heard it, I would still instinctively turn the dial when those opening chords came out of the speaker, and I cringed if someone started fingering those familiar riffs at a song swap. Fast forward a few decades, and a couple of weeks ago, on a trip to Brooklyn, I inserted into the player a homemade compilation CD that a friend had given me years ago, not knowing what to expect. Track 2 turned out to be Stairway to Heaven, and even though I knew very well the roads that we were winding down, both with the van and with the CD player, the moment brought back much of the fine feelings that this song had inspired 4 decades ago, and I felt like the tune had come to me at last.

Sunday, January 24, 2016

Good Question

Song 287: For this week’s playlist track you can hear Why Not Me by The Judds, written by Harlan Howard, Sonny Throckmorton and Brent Maher. In the mid-‘80s, the Judds made a very big splash on the country charts, with a string of songs that sounded good and did well on the radio, and this track, which was the title cut for their first album, grabbed my attention the first time I heard it. I remember checking out an LP cover of the mother and daughter duo, not knowing which one was the younger, and deciding that I found the mother more attractive than the daughter, though they both looked pretty good on that record jacket. During that era, it’s possible that I might have been spotted on a stage in the East Bay area playing bass for a country bar pickup band, and if so, a female lead singer might have covered this song, as well as a few others by the Judds. On a side note, this track is a second sly reference to the second verse of my own song As Long as Merle is Still Haggard, which begins with the line Should Patty Loveless when Wynonna, she’s Judd fine(?), Wynonna Judd being the daughter in the mother and daughter singing duo. You can find the As Long as Merle is Still Haggard video here. The songwriter’s name Harlan Howard may look familiar, as it appears on a bunch of standout country songs, from early classics like I Fall to Pieces, Busted, and Heartaches by the Number, to more recent hits like the Pam Tillis cut Don’t Tell Me What to Do (Song 210) which I used as my first sly reference to the opening line of verse one of As Long as Merle is Still Haggard, that line being Now Pam Tillis, the truth now.

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Browne-eyed Guy

Song 286: For this week’s playlist track, you can listen to Doctor My Eyes by Jackson Browne, who also wrote the song. I had noticed Jackson Browne’s name on the credits of a handful of excellent cuts in the 2 years before this single appeared. Tom Rush had a pair of very good JB songs on an LP he released in the spring of 1970, which was a record I had spinning on my own turntable a lot back then. The Byrds also had a JB track on one of their albums, as did Brewer and Shipley, so I already had a lot of respect for Jackson’s songwriting long before word came that he would soon have his own LP available. During the spring of 1972, I happened to do a lot of hitching, shuffling between Chicago, Atlanta, and New York a few times, and somewhere along the way, I heard this cut for the first time while in a grocery store or drug store. I knew Jackson had a single out, and when this track started playing, I felt certain that it had to be the one. From that very first hearing, I really liked the catchy piano riff that kicks off the song, as well as the track’s uptempo feel, which suitably supports the thoughtful and reflective words. So often in that era, in the early years of crafting my own lyrical stories, I would hear a new record and imagine some sort of accompanying deeply-poetic lyric, only to be disappointed, when I learned the actual lines, by mundane cliches and cheap rhymes. In stark contrast, Jackson’s single, and indeed, his entire first album, totally lived up to my expectations, both in words and music. Doctor My Eyes always sounded very good to my ears, and quite illuminating to my imagination as well.

Monday, January 11, 2016

Loving the Crazy Ones

Song 285: For this week’s playlist track, you can hear Crazy Ones by John Mellencamp, written by John Mellencamp and Randy Handley. I remember seeing the ads for JM’s new album Whenever We Wanted on the buses in Manhattan in the fall on 1991, and I really liked the cover picture of him playing guitar in an artist’s studio surrounded by paintings, with a pretty woman sitting in the studio, looking very much like an artist’s model. That graphic gave me a very positive feeling for the CD, and when every track I heard on the radio sounded as good as it did, I soon decided I wanted a copy of that new record. It didn’t take too many spins to conclude that, as good as some earlier Mellencamp albums might be, for me, Whenever We Wanted topped them all. This cut, near the middle of the set, really resonated with me, as one of those I could have written that — I’ve been there too moments. At the time, I had recently gotten to the end of my second roller-coaster ride from falling for one of the crazy ones, after having taken a similar ride the year before. The 1990 experience inspired the song Thanks a Lot that appeared on the Country Drivin’ CD, and the 1991 adventure inspired another song, though I haven’t quite found the right context for a recording of that one. Over the last few years, I feel like I’ve found the answer to John’s question, and I would share it with him if I ever had the chance. He's asking the right person when he sings, “Mama, why do I always fall for the crazy ones?” However, his mama may not be able to tell him, but being his mother’s son lies at the heart of why “the crazy ones leave me (and him) feeling like this.” If JM hasn’t figured it out for himself yet, and if he’d like me to fill in the details, I could do it — he’ll just have to send me an email, or maybe connect on Facebook, Twitter or whatever.

Sunday, January 3, 2016

Moonrise

Song 284: This week’s playlist track turns out to be Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival, written by John Fogerty. The YT video for this song that’s linked to my website contains some very entertaining footage of the band performing the tune, although it’s not a live performance video, but rather, live footage matched to the record, as well as a few stills of the band thrown in, but all in all, a good visual track that goes well with the cut. When this song came rocking out of the radio speaker a month or 2 before my HS graduation, if felt like a perfect fit for that moment. The decade I grew up in felt very intense and apocalyptic, in and of itself, with very real scenes from Viet Nam battlefields playing on the 6 o’clock news and the threat of nuclear war constantly hanging over our heads, sometimes haunting our dreams. Add to that the fundamentalist Christian background of my family, which included a strong belief in biblical end times prophecies, and this cut captured the essence of the era. Almost four years after Eve of Destruction (Song 146), it felt good that destruction hadn’t yet arrived, but it also felt like we were that much closer to the stroke of midnight. When the actual stroke of midnight on 12/31/69 passed, and I celebrated the arrival of a new year and new decade by catching a ride from a friend on a snowmobile while on Christmas break as a college freshman, I felt a slight sense of relief that my species had made it out of the ’60s without destroying ourselves. Much turmoil would lie ahead, including the Kent State shooting in the coming spring, more campus demonstrations against the war and the like, but at least we hadn’t blown up our entire civilization, so the Bad Moon had risen, but it had also gone back down, and we were still around. On a humorous note, for the first few times I heard this, I thought Fogerty was singing Black Moon Rising, and that was what I mouthed when I sang along with the record. I also remember reading some critic who mentioned the ‘50s influence on the CCR sound coming through on certain tracks, this being one, and I didn’t understand the context at the time, so I didn’t know what to make of that critique, though it would become much clearer over the next few years as the classic rock of the ‘50s enjoyed a revival of sorts. Many fans of this song probably know the joke about the final chorus line “There’s a bad moon on the rise” being sung as “There’s a bathroom on the right” which reportedly Fogerty himself sometimes did, and if there’s any truth to the rumor about me performing with a country bar pickup band in the East Bay during the 1980s, then it’s quite possible that the lead singer for that outfit did the same thing. As the year 2016 begins, and candidates for the top spot talk about carpet bombing and making the sand glow, that bad moon could be rising once again, but hopefully, by early November, it will have gone back down and we’ll still be around.