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.

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.

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.

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!