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.

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.

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.

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.