Radiant Celebrity

Song 660: This week the playlist applauds Sunshine Superman by Donovan, who also wrote the song, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Along my HS years, my best friend soon became a big fan of a certain Scottish Don guy, as did I, and since the two of us had much of our genealogy coming from that fellow's homeland, we felt a kind of mystical connection with him. In the middle of the summer following our freshman year, Mr. Leitch took us on an engaging melodic lift that gave us a crafty shining clue about his talent for magically covering ground at a high level and also for diving deep where gems might hide. Back then, my best friend's brother would often buy 45s from the latest Top 40 list, and when he got tired of spinning the discs, he'd sell them to me for less than half of what he had paid for them. I don't recall if I picked this one up from him, but regardless of whether I did so or not, I DID get to hear the shiner a lot during those bright warm sunny days that season, and I enjoyed the way it lit up my daily background. Being a typical young male, I of course pictured myself as a potential Sunshine Superman for a couple of attractive young women in my age range, although they themselves probably didn’t see me that way. Now that the current year's warmer stretch has arrived in the northeast region, we here can start thinking 'bout all the rainbows that over the next few months we might have for our own.

Elevated and Distant

 Song 659: This week on the playlist you can hear Over the Hills and Far Away by Led Zeppelin, written by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, and you can find an entertaining YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. The aircraft quartet got a whole bunch of us climbing the Stairway to Heaven (Song 288) in late 1972, and early along in the following year, they then took us on this high and scenic lift, and though it didn't quite break through the way the flight of steps had, it still did cover a lot of attractive-sounding territory. My wife and I lived in my Chicago-area college town during that stretch, and we had adopted a feline brother and sister to enliven our home. When we took in that duo in December of 1972, we originally prevented them from entering our bedroom at night when we went to bed, and after about a week, by the time we got up one morning, Joker (the male) had disappeared. As far as I could tell, the only way he could have left would have been to climb to the roof in the fireplace chimney, and soon after I mentioned that possibility to our upstairs neighbor, she knocked on our door and told us she heard a cat meowing on the roof, which we then heard. While I did not enjoy rescuing him from the building topper, I could feel grateful that he had not gone Over the Hills and Far Away, and luckily, for the year and a half that we resided in that apartment, that would be the only time when we had been missing him. In early 1974 we moved to Atlanta, GA, and while living there, both of our furry companions had the chance to walk a while with me and my darling.

Working Class Heritage

 Song 658: This week on the playlist you’ll find Daddy Never Was the Cadillac Kind by Confederate Railroad, written by Dave Gibson and Bernie Nelson, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. In the early 1990s I listened a lot to a NYC New Country radio station, as well as a RnR one, and by doing so, I got to hear a bunch of memorable movers, including this ride that came along around the time that spring arrived in 1994. In that era I moved from my Brooklyn apartment over to a scenic farm in nearby NJ, which was the place I featured in my As Long as Merle is Still Haggard video (which you can hear and see on YouTube by clicking on the title) and which included scenes with my landlord. While living there, I had a decent set of wheels, but I Never Was the Cadillac Kind, and neither was my Daddy (or grand-Daddy), so the message of this tune resonated with me the first time I heard it. Soon after moving into the farm, I began a romance with an attractive young woman who also Never Was the Cadillac Kind, and getting to know her parents a while later, I could tell that her Daddy Never Was the Cadillac Kind either. Over the next few years, I came to clearly understand the class divide that my teachers had denied during my school years, and which the lines of this excursion slyly reference. I didn't know then what I know now, but I did appreciate all that my father and grandfather did to make sure we the family were NOT ever going hungry, and I felt thankful that they taught us that love was the one thing money couldn't buy.

Combustion Location

 Song 657: This week the playlist comes around to Fireplace by R.E.M., written by Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. On an evening in June of 1983, my band Victims of Technology performed as the first of two opening acts for a quartet that had given themselves a name which I thought slyly referred to the dream stage of sleep. I had only begun to hear their music, and I hadn't come to any conclusions about it before that show. After their set, however, I felt certain that I had to pay more attention to their sounds, which I soon did. When their Document LP came out 4 years later, I quickly had a copy in hand. This marks the fifth appearance of a gem from that disc among this collection, and I might quite likely feature 1 or 2 more in the next year or 2. The One I Love is Song 36, It's the End of the World is Song 322, Finest Worksong is Song 419, and Welcome To The Occupation is Song 571. As much as it might have seemed like a crazy crazy world and crazy crazy times during the mid-1980s, truth is much stranger than fiction now than it was 4 decades ago, so today we can ask the question about if we should shake the rug into the fireplace and/or should we believe that The U.S. Should Show It Can Win a Nuclear War (an April 2022 WSJ headline)? Even POTUS Reagan understood back in 1985 that the only winners of a nuclear war would be THE COCKROACHES, but today a national security advisor can openly advocate for ending human civilization, which is WAY CRAZIER than trying to throw the walls into the fireplace.