What Belongs to Who

Song 325: Seven weeks after my last personal friend song post, this week on the playlist you’ll find This One’s Mine by my friend Patti Rothberg, who also wrote the song, and there’s a YouTube video of her performing it live here. My recording engineer and co-producer David Seitz introduced me to Patti in the fall of 2003, while we were both using the same studio. At the time, I was working on Elder Street, and she was working on Double Standards. I quickly became a PR fan, and her earlier CDs Between the 1 and the 9 and Candelabra Cadabra soon became regular spinners on my player. When I finally got around to getting an iPod, those 2 CDs were also among the first group of albums to find places on the drive, and Patti’s music kept me company on lots of metro rides. This track is the third cut on her debut CD, and like many other PR tracks, has humorous remarks that still make me smile, despite having heard them countless times. If you’ve never experienced Patti’s wit and wisdom before, the line “I could say that you were a dirty dog but that’s an insult to the fleas” can give you a taste of what you’ve missed.

A Fun-loving Fellow

Song 324: This week on the playlist you can hear Honky-Tonk Man by Dwight Yoakam, written by Johnny Horton, Tillman Franks and Howard Hausey. The original version of this cut came out when I was 4. My Ohio relatives had a good collection of country LPs, and on our summer visits, I essentially had my pick of listening material after I had demonstrated an ability to handle the records and the turntable with appropriate care, so during my grade school years I would soon learn many country classics of the era, getting to know the Honky-Tonk Man long before the Beatles rocked my world. I always appreciated the fun quality of the track, never taking it too seriously, but even as a kid, I thought the guy spending his time and money chasing women in bars and then calling home to ask his wife for help after he blew all of his cash sounded very entertaining in a song, but would have been a jerk in real life. Whatever changes I went through in my teens and twenties regarding viewpoints on relationships, that perspective didn’t change. When Dwight Yoakam’s version came along in 1986, peaking near the top of the country charts, it brought back memories of preteen times. If there’s any truth to the rumor that I played bass for a Bay Area country bar pickup band during a few years of that decade, then it’s quite possible that the group’s lead singer might have called this tune during a set on any given gig night, with the rest of us enthusiastically jumping in. On a side note, this track is a fourth sly reference to the second verse of my own song As Long as Merle is Still Haggard, where the second line begins with But Dwight was only Yoakam when he said… You can find the As Long as Merle is Still Haggard video here.

A Thrilling Ride

Song 323: This week the playlist rides on The Crystal Ship by The Doors, who also wrote the song. During my HS years, my record collection consisted entirely of 45s, and most of those I bought used from my best friend’s younger brother and smuggled into a special basement hiding spot. Not long after I brought it home, the Doors’ debut single quickly became a regular spinner, and I always listened to both sides, actually preferring this B-side cut to the more famous A-side hit. Even though I owned no LPs in that fall of my junior year at HS, I got to hear The Doors quite a lot at the time, sometimes at friend’s houses and also at certain school gatherings, such as the monthly layout session of the student newspaper where I always played a role, so I soon got to know that disc very well. This track, like most of the others, rattled the religious conflict that I struggled with as I listened to a singer of the devil’s music tell about a ship that would contain a thousand girls and a thousand thrills, feeling quite certain that none of the older generation members at my church would approve of the thrills or the girls, but I enjoyed it so much that I couldn’t resist taking the musical ride on that boat, no matter what it might do to my soul. I’ve always relished Ray Manzarek’s piano solo in the middle of the song, which takes me every time along some magical dark Twilight Zone seas of thought, as it did when I first heard it. Ray died in May of 2013, but his music lives on, and The Crystal Ship still sails.

Finding Pleasure in the Chaos

Song 322: This week on the playlist you can hear It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) by R.E.M., written by Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe. Last week’s track, Gimme Shelter, featured words very similar to what might these days come out of the mouth of someone living in a war zone in places like Syria and Yemen, and people there probably do feel like it’s the end of the world as they know it, so this cut seemed like an appropriate follow-up, although I doubt very many of those war zone residents would say they feel fine. Listening to this record during the present-day election season, the line “You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light” seems to describe some of what a certain campaign has expressed, and it comes near the end of a verse that has the word trumped in its first line, interestingly enough. As much as I relish this recording and the stream of consciousness dark dreams the words convey, I do hope that when the current tournament of lies reaches its November conclusion, it’s actually not the end of the world as we know it. On a side note, my band Victims of Technology opened for R.E.M. at The Stone in San Francisco back in June of 1983, and I give more details about that in my post for The One I Love (Song 36).

Important Words of Warning

Song 321: This week the playlist comes around to Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, as my pick to honor the International Day of Peace that happens on Wednesday, 9/21. I arrived at Northwestern University’s Bobb Hall in September of 1969 as a major Beatles fan, but Hank Neuberger, who lived across the hall from me, strongly insisted that the Rolling Stones were much better than the Fab Four, and he soon started trying to prove his point. Having a well-stocked collection of LPs and a top quality stereo with large speakers, he happily played a lot of the Stones for my benefit. I heard Let It Bleed (their latest release) many times, and that album soon became a personal favorite. In particular, I remember one late afternoon when Hank put the needle down on it, with the system cranked loudly, and as much as I already liked this song, I felt at that moment that it sounded better than anything and everything, so he had essentially won the debate, at least for the 4 and a half minutes of this cut. Whatever I have attempted, and many other songwriters as well, I would credit Mick and Keith with creating a recording here that conveys the darkly destructive force of war in a much stronger and more compelling way than any other record by anyone else, myself included. At the time I was first hearing this track, I didn’t come close to grasping the horrors that the U.S. military presence was wreaking in Viet Nam and its neighbors, but Merry Cleyton screaming about rape and murder gives a powerful voice to the Apocalypse Now footage in the YouTube video at the link here, and makes you feel the horrific reality of those lyrics. Two decades later, in the period shortly before the 1991 Iraq war, tuned into the local NYC rock station, this track came across the airwaves, and it perfectly fit that moment of dread when people knew that a new war was coming soon. It had lost none of its power, and in fact, sounded even more powerful than it had in 1969. Today, after another 25 years, with Iraq still the scene of armed conflict, among the countless and endless wars raging in that part of the globe, and in far too many other places, this song serves as a forceful warning that war, rape and murder are all, indeed, just a shot away, and at this very moment, someone in Syria or Yemen could be saying, “Ooh, see the fire is sweepin’ our very street today.”

Expressing Some Genuine Gratitude

Song 320: This week on the playlist you can hear Thanks a Lot  by Third Eye Blind, written by Stephan Jenkins and Kevin Cadogan. As i mentioned in my post for Song 117 (Burning Man), for a while all I knew about Third Eye Blind was their hit Graduate (Song 105), and while I liked that cut quite a bit, I didn’t get particularly motivated to buy their CD until I happened to hear the entire record as background music one night while sharing a meal with a friend at a restaurant in Manhattan. While Graduate and Burning Man stood out as favorites, I quickly found that I liked the sound of the entire record, and it sounds as good to me today as it did 2 decades ago. I also feel no jealousy over the fact that my CD from the same era, called Country Drivin’, includes a track with the same title. In the case of Third Eye Blind, their cut expresses some genuine gratitude, after the singer laughed in the night and felt all right, whereas my song carries a more sarcastic edge, since the night I wrote about turned out in a much different way. I posted a rough cut video of my Thanks a Lot on YouTube a few years ago which you can hear by clicking on the title.

Feeling Good

Song 319: This week the playlist comes around to Feel Like Makin’ Love by Bad Company, written by Paul Rodgers and Mick Ralphs. In the early ‘70s, rock radio playlists seemed to be getting shorter and shorter, which I took as a sign of a lack of worthy new releases, though I now understand it was actually a matter of consolidation, both of radio stations and record labels. Friends would often talk about whether rock and roll might be coming to an end, and in one such exchange, around the late summer of ’75, I said that while the RnR spirit had become much too rare, there were still records keeping that spirit alive, and I named this cut as being one of those, since it was then currently rocking the airwaves. On a side note, I found out by doing research for this piece that Bad Company bassist Boz Burrell, prior to the formation of the group, played bass and sang lead vocals for King Crimson, though he did so in the era a couple of years after their initial release which featured the title track In the Court of the Crimson King (Song 312 and 7/17/16 Blog Post A Regal Location). Sadly, Mr. Burrell died of a sudden heart attack about 10 years ago, in late September of 2006, while rehearsing in Spain with Scottish blues singer Tam White.