Having a Job To Do

Song 514: Seven weeks after my previous personal friend song post, this week's entertaining jog Get Back to Work comes from my good buddy Joe Giacoio, who also wrote the song, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. I first saw his name when he signed onto my mailing list (back in the days before email) following a set I did at a folkie club in The Bronx. I got to meet him not long after that, and we soon became close friends, to the point that when he did his 1997 CD Superman's Midlife Crisis (which features this cut) I actually did some of the photo and layout work for the project, and enjoyed doing so. The lyrics on this track always make me smile, as I treasure the way Joe parodies the tough boss types, pointing his finger at God and the angels, asking them if they have nothing to do but sit around singing. As our society slowly reopens following the pandemic, I wish the workers well, but unfortunately, I expect that far too many of them, if and when they do Get Back to Work, will face the kind of ridiculous behavior that Joe makes fun of in this tune. I'd personally like to see the manager tell the angels they need to earn their wings this year, but the sad reality is that he's more likely to direct his wrath at the ones who can't fly away.

No Need to Wear a Mask Here

Song 513: This week on the playlist you can hear Come As You Are by Nirvana, written by Kurt Cobain, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. When Nirvana's second album Nevermind showed up at the end of the summer in 1991, it got a lot of attention, and rightly so, I thought. I particularly liked the sound of this follow-up single (and I also really enjoy the video the band did for the hit, which I saw for the first time today). I had recently decided to feature a Nirvana track in this stretch as I got close to finishing the second edition of my book Expecting the Broken Brain to Do Mental Pushups, having finally had the time to complete the rewrite. The paperback focuses on my step-by-step understanding of psychiatric disorders, and about 2/3 of the way along that journey, the unfolding tragedy of Mr. Cobain's bipolar trauma, which led him to commit suicide, played a major role in putting together the puzzle for me. At the time that he killed himself, I had no comprehension, or respect, for the suffering that motivated him to pull the trigger, but a few years after, The Sock Drawer Moment (chapter 14) happened, and the necessary pieces fell into place. As I mention in the following chapter, I later said to a psychiatrist that Kurt sacrificed his life for the sake of his art, and the doctor replied, “Yes, he did!” I now have a lot more regard for the man than I did when he ended his life, and while it does sound ironic to hear him sing I don't have a gun, I certainly can venerate him for turning an old enemy into a friend, as the lyrics of this cut picture him doing.

Lessons Learned From Sitting Still

Song 512: This week the playlist puts the spotlight on Traffic Jam by James Taylor, who also wrote the song, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. I had become a major JT fan during the summer of 1970 when I introduced my fellow camp counselors to Sweet Baby James, which fascinated them as much as me, to the point where that LP hit the turntable almost every day, in the months before Fire and Rain hit the charts. Seven years later, when Mr. Taylor released an album called JT, it had a few tracks that immediately grabbed my attention, including this one that appears just before the record's closer. Living in the Chicago area at the time, I all-too-often had also found myself in a situation where I could have given voice to the phrase Damn this traffic jam! Getting to know the cut, I felt most impressed with the couplet at the end, which expresses a perceptive view of the foundational dilemma on the road ahead: I used to think that I was cool running around on fossil fuel until I saw what I was doing was riding down the road to ruin. Now, a little over 4 decades later, a large proportion of our human comrades recognize what he, and I, did back then. Of course, with the current pandemic lockdowns, we have a lot fewer traffic jams, and a lot cleaner air across the globe, but as we gradually return to normalcy, our fossil fuel challenges will return as well. However, if you drive an EV, or a hybrid, getting stuck in a traffic jam won't hurt your motor, won't create any pollution, and usually won't waste any power, even if it takes fifteen minutes to go three blocks.

One Towering Female Character

Song 511: This week the playlist recognizes Long Tall Sally by Little Richard, written by Enotris Johnson, Robert Blackwell and Richard Penniman, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. This particular lanky woman appears on the playlist today as a way to honor Little Richard, who sadly just passed away, but who did make it well past his 87th birthday. I first met this female incarnation via The Beatles, and I certainly enjoyed getting to know her. When the Fab Four rocked my world back in the winter of my seventh grade, I wrongly believed that they and their fellow British Invaders had created RnR, but I finally started digging deeper into the real story around the turn of the 1970s, when I arrived at college and got a subscription to Rolling Stone that began filling in the blanks for me, as did a 1950s revival that also happened on the radio during the same era. I soon came to appreciate the role that shouters like Little Richard had played in laying the groundwork for the music that had grabbed me, and I often concluded, with cuts like this one, that if I had heard the original versions, I would probably have become a fan of that pioneering bunch even before a certain February 1964 Ed Sullivan Show. In spite of the rough current unfolding reality that can make things feel all wrong, I urge folks to have some fun tonight listening to this track, and when you do, let it make you feel like everything’s all right.

A Deadly State of Affairs

Song 510: This week the playlist comes around to Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, written by Neil Young, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Today being the 50th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre, it seemed like an appropriate moment to feature the stirring opus that Mr. Young wrote about the horrific incident. I had to do the post a day late this week due to a minor sickness that kept me in bed yesterday, but maybe that actually turns out to be a good thing. During my freshman year at NU, I joined a mass demonstration protesting the Nixon/Kissinger bombing campaign of Cambodia which would end up killing millions of innocent civilians. That day, a similar protest happened at Kent State, and there, national guard soldiers fired at the crowd, killing 4 students. On hearing the news about the shooting, we at NU had a bigger and louder follow-up mass demonstration, as did many other campuses across the country. When summer rolled around, I spent a good portion of it working as a counselor and music teacher at a music and art summer camp near Camptown, PA, where I heard no news whatsoever about the rest of the world, so I missed the release of this amazing hit. However, not long after I returned to Evanston, IL, at the end of the summer, I did get to hear it, and it gave me chills the first time around because it painted such a clear and compelling picture of what happened in May in Ohio. On a side note, at our protest on 5/4, someone approached me with a petition to have Nixon impeached, and I reacted by saying, “But if he got removed, then we'd have Agnew as president!” Given that reality, I couldn't sign the paper, no matter how much I might have agreed with its POV.