Extreme Warmth

 Song 626: Seven weeks after my previous personal friend song post, this week's moving ride So Hot comes from one of my rocking NJ songwriter buddies, Joe Canzano, who also wrote the song, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. He and I hung out a few times together in the 1994-1996 period when I lived on the farm that appears in my song video As Long as Merle is Still Haggard (which you can hear and see on YouTube by clicking on the title). After I moved back to Brooklyn, about 3 years later he recorded the tunes for his Guitars, Stars and Candy Bars CD in 1999. I helped him design and put together the graphics for that album, which includes this blazing spin. Yesterday I spoke with a friend living in Oregon who told me that this coming week the daily forecast highs will be over 100 degrees F, so tonight seemed like an appropriate moment to feature a real sizzler. Of course, it’s a dark, dark day when you walk away from the only light you can see, but on those days when a man cannot give a damn about politics or poetry, he can still feel So Hot for a particular female.

Rural Routes Bring Me to My Place

 Song 625: This week the playlist comes around to Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver, written by Bill Danoff, Taffy Nivert and John Denver, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. I spent the hot months of 1971 on The Strip in Atlanta, GA, as a summer missionary at a Southern Baptist Church outreach center, and in that era I expanded my interest in fellow singer/songwriter types like Bob Dylan and Gordon Lightfoot, but I don't recall this anthem crossing my ears as it rode the airwaves and climbed the charts. I've always associated this Denver gem with April of 1972, so I guess I probably heard it for the first time then, soon after I hooked up with a female companion who, like me, truly relished the way the ramble expressed and illustrated a deep appreciation of nature. We usually ended up in urban settings during that stretch, with both of us wishing we could find a more rural residence, but no matter how often we rode along country roads, they could never take us home to the place where we could belong.

Unknown Figure Construction

 Song 624: This week on the playlist you can hear Who Made Who by AC/DC, written by Malcolm Young, Angus Young and Brian Johnson, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. A punchy Australian quintet got a lot of notice for doing Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap (Song 480) back in the mid-1970s, and soon after I hitched out to the East Bay of CA in the summer of 1978, the five rode the Highway to Hell (Song 425). Then, in the late winter of 1986, as I resided in Berkeley, they got their audience wondering about how to answer a short question. A few months before, I had completed and issued my initial cassette release Going My Way, which mainly revolves around a folkie singer/songwriter tone, with a few added bluesy sprinkles, and perhaps someone riding my rambles might not guess about how much I personally relish the heavy touch of the AC/DC types. I'm currently working on putting together an updated CD version of GMW, which I hope to have done in a few months. These days, no matter who plays the game, anyone might see it spinnin' like a dynamo and feel it goin' round and round, making us all wonder who turned the screw.

Small Elderly Female

 Song 623: This week the playlist recognizes The Little Old Lady (From Pasadena) by Jan and Dean, written by Don Altfeld, Jan Berry and Roger Christian, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. A few months after the Fab Four rocked my world, this amusing spinner got moving all over the airwaves. The British invasion had captured my attention throughout the previous few months, but I knew that this joyride came from the West Coast, not from the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean, and I liked how it took RnR in a different but still captivating direction. While I often didn't get to hear much of the Top Forty, due at least in part to my fundamentalist family's opposition to the devil's music,  I DID get to hear this one because apparently it didn't bother them. I still recall the moment when it came on the car radio, and my grandfather, while driving the vehicle, smiled and let it play on rather than angrily turning it off, which I had seen him do several times before in reaction to songs that lit his fuse. Of course, around a decade went by before I learned the snarky back story behind the lyrics here, which got inspired by the Little Old Lady lie that car sellers often used in that era to unload a set of wheels after illegally lowering the odometer figure. Ironically, in 1983 I bought a 1967 Dodge that had only 40,000 miles on it, getting it from one of my guitar buddies, and I knew I could trust him, plus I also knew the Little Old Lady relative that had owned it. She did not drive real fast or drive real hard, and no guys would come to race her from all around because she could actually keep her foot off the accelerator.

Smug Guardian

 Song 622: This week the playlist puts the spotlight on Vigilante Man  by Woody Guthrie, who also wrote the song, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Somehow I got all the way to Song 589 (Roll On Colombia) before it occurred to me to add Mr. WG to this group, so I want to honor him more as this collection gets longer. His birthday comes on 7/14, and he would have reached 110 this year had he lived, but sadly, he died at half that age, due to having Huntington's disease (a condition I mention in my book Expecting the Broken Brain to Do Mental Pushups because I knew someone personally who had that ailment). Developing my own singer/songwriter style when the 1970s arrived and I approached the end of my second decade, I became a fan of other prominent singer/songwriters such as Bob Dylan, and I soon found out how the Woody fellow had set the groundwork for those of us crafting and performing solo musical rambles. I had known about Guthrie's most famous anthem This Land Is Your Land during my HS years and I also heard about a certain eatery that his son Arlo got attention for on the airwaves, but I learned and appreciated a lot more of Woody's original moving excursions at the 1970s unfolded. In that era, I sometimes rambled 'round from town to town, and on stormy days I passed the time away, even sleepin' in some good warm place when I could. Fortunately, I never got herded around like a wild herd of cattle and I never saw a vigilante man with a sawed-off shot-gun in his hand.