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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.