Firing at Earth’s Satellite

 Song 794: This week the playlist puts the spotlight on Shoot the Moon by Hugh Blumenfeld, who also wrote the song, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Usually I add a friend song to this list every seven weeks, but the last one I did only six weeks after the previous one (780 and 786) so now this one comes eight weeks later, having been created by another one of my Fast Folk buddies. He included the tune on his Rocket Science album that he released back in the late 1990s, during an era when I helped to maintain the FF magazine by doing the layouts for it. A few decades earlier, as a teenager, I rarely stood under the street lamps at night, and even with my toy guns during my single-digit years, I doubt it ever occurred to me to try to shoot the moon. I will never forget, though, that one small step for mankind that I saw on a TV in 1969 when humans actually walked on the moon for the first time.

Keep Me Illuminated

 Song 793: This week on the playlist you can hear Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me by Elton John, written by him and and Bernie Taupin, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. In early 1974, my wife and I had decided to leave the frigid Windy City area and have a more comfortable environment by moving to Atlanta, GA, so when Elton's request for continued enlightenment arrived around that time, I expected that the two of us would soon have a brighter habitat, and before long, we took a chance and changed our way of life, thereby getting to a shinier region. We found a very nice apartment on the first floor of a house, and we enjoyed spending a lot of time sitting on the home's front porch where we could listen to music we liked and sing along when we felt like doing that. The radio probably shared this glowing anthem quite a bit when we did that, but neither of us ever thought that we had gotten blinded by the light.

Questioning Your Method

 Song 792: This week the playlist recognizes How Do You Do it? by Gerry and the Pacemakers, written by Mitch Murray, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Soon after the Beatles rocked my world in February of 1964, a bunch of their fellow British Invaders came along and got us younger types going along with their musical rides, including another Liverpool group who asked a question about someone's effective techniques. Back then, as I approached my first teenage year, I could have asked the same question that the singer does in this tune, since I had no idea what sparked my attraction to a certain young female of a similar age. I didn't have a clue as to how she gave me a feeling in my heart, like an arrow passing through it, but I could never find out what triggered that appeal because in the spring of the following year, her family moved on to the West Coast.

Focused on You

 Song 791: This week the playlist applauds So Into You by Atlanta Rhythm Section, written by Perry Carlton "Buddy" Buie, Robert Lafayette Nix and William Dean Daughtry, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Following my sohomore year at Northwestern University, I spent the summer of 1971 serving as a Southern Baptist missionary in Atlanta, GA. I rode on a plane that landed there on 6/10/71 and that marked the first time I had ever visited a spot south of the Mason-Dixon line. I soon found out about an Allman Brothers quintet that made some interesting sounds, and then about another local rocking group that also sounded really good, so they both got me to appreciate Southern rock. I did get to hear that sextet do at least one Atlanta concert during that summer. I headed back north around the middle of August, and the quintet began to get a lot of attention starting that fall, but the rhythmic sextet did not start catching radio listener ears until around 1977, when this gem topped the charts. At that point, I planned to hitch to California when the next summer came along, and thinking about how it was going to be, I thought it was gonna be good to stretch out my thumb in a westward direction, and it did actually go very well!