People of a Different Color

Song 374: 7 weeks after my last personal friend song post, this week on the playlist you will find Everybody Woke Up Green by my good friend Joe Canzano, who also wrote the song, and you can hear a YouTube video of it here. The first time I heard Joe perform this tune, in the early 1990s, it became an instant favorite, and on the night when he showed up at the Jack Hardy songwriter gathering on Houston St., I suggested that he use it as his calling card, which he did. As much as I always enjoyed the deft commentary on racism and other ethnic phobias embodied in this recording's lyrics, the current political environment has highlighted their meaning to a degree I could not have imagined 2 decades ago. Given recent racist episodes in Ferguson and other similar events across the country, the line about cops out in Loa Angeles might sound odd at first, but if you recall the Rodney King riots of 1992, then you understand that while the bad news has lately come from other places, L.A. certainly earned its reference in the words here. I savor the science-fiction vision of a world where everyone's skin has turned green, and the folks at Breitbart etc. would plead for a new method to determine who we're supposed to hate. To give Joe the last word, truly, there is no proper color to cover ignorance.

Celebrating the Season

Song 373: For the last post before autumn officially begins, I wanted to add A Summer Song by Chad and Jeremy, written by Chad Stuart, Clive Metcalfe and Keith Noble, onto the playlist, and you can view a YouTube video of it here. This hit actually came along in the early fall of 1964, 8 months after the Beatles had rocked my world, with Chad and Jeremy creating their own kind of magic noise as part of the British Invasion that the Fab Four had launched. My good friend Ed (the subject of my tune So Long Friend) enjoyed the music of this duo as much as I did, and he at some point acquired the Yesterday’s Gone LP that contained this cut, which meant that I got to savor its catchy melody and wistful lyrics many times during my teenage years. Soon enough, autumn leave must fall, (in my area they already started coming down, even though the fall doesn’t formally arrive until later this week), and the good things of summer will end, but when the rain beats against my window pane, this record can offer some comfort, and serve as a reminder to think of summer days again. On a side note, you can watch a YouTube lyric video of my track So Long Friend just by clicking on the title.

Words of Warning

Song 372: This week on the playlist you can hear London Calling by The Clash, written by Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, and you can watch a YouTube video of it here. With Hurricane Irma hitting the coast of FL, threatening nuclear facilities there, this track about the hazards of a nuclear meltdown seems to fit the current moment. My initial impression of the British punk bands was that the press about them made them sound a lot cooler than their actual records did, but when this single came along near the end of 1979, I definitely liked what I heard. I had started to make the anti-nuke rally scene, and in addition, I had written a tune about Three Mile Island called Wind Whistle, but in that long-ago era before azlyrics.com and musixmatch.com, not knowing all of the lines on this cut, I picked up more of an anti-nuclear war message, without realizing that the words could also refer to nuclear power plant troubles. I sincerely hope that A nuclear error does not occur in FL due to Irma (or anything else), but that very possibility should serve as a reminder of the dangers that nuclear power plants can pose, and the fact that everyone will be better off when all such facilities are retired, and that we should not build any more of them. On that note, you can watch a YouTube lyric video of my song Wind Whistle just by clicking on the title.

Heavy Work

Song 371: This week’s playlist track is Sixteen Tons by Tennessee Ernie Ford, written by Merle Travis, and you can find the YouTube video of it here. It seems appropriate, in honor of Labor Day, to post a work song, and I learned this golden oldie at quite a young age, though when I first heard it, on a TV show in the early 1960s, it had already been around for a few years. It also appeared among my Ohio relatives' extensive country collection, so during our even-numbered-year summer visits there in that decade, I would usually include this record as part of my listening fun, with my aunt and uncle letting me choose the discs I wanted to spin. While my father didn’t work in a coal mine, what he got from his full-time job was also another day older and deeper in debt, which is a line that came from a letter written to the songwriter by his brother. It was their father, a coal miner, who said to them, "I can’t afford to die. I owe my soul to the company store." All too often in our history, a group of wealthy greed-heads have succeeded in dividing and conquering the working class, through techniques such as segregation, racism and xenophobia, to keep the workers from uniting in large-enough numbers to demand and receive a living wage. Until laborers get beyond such divisions, most of them will continue to owe their souls to the company store.

Flowers in Full Bloom

Song 370: This week the playlist comes around to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers In Your Hair) by Scott McKenzie, written by John Phillips. When this song came along in the late spring 50 years ago, I was already a big fan of Papa John's songwriting, having gotten hooked a year earlier on the music of The Mamas and The Papas, but I had no idea about the community that had gravitated to the Haight-Ashbury district, so I really liked the record the first time I heard it, but it took a while for me to get the message. Growing up in a conservative and fundamentalist religious home, I didn't necessarily connect with the hippie counterculture, as much as I did with the music, but by 3 years later, having lived nearly a year outside of the family circle after graduating HS, I had fully plugged in with hippiedom and the peace bohemians. This year, on the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, one of those peace types defused and ultimately entirely deflated a scheduled neo-Nazi rally in San Francisco. The gathering was due to happen yesterday, August 26, but, unlike Charlottesville, where antifas met nNs with serious signs and protests, and serious injury and death ensued, in SF, an artist named Tuffy Tuffington created a Facebook event page that recommended greeting the nN assembly with flowers for their hair, and a carpet of dog poop. Tuffy’s inspired hilarity quickly galvanized an opposition force that included clowns, kayakers and kids, and the Flowers Against Fascism actually succeeded in getting the alt-righters to cancel their gig. Kudos to Mr. Tuffington for putting the Turd Reich into context, using humor to defuse the fascist absurdity, which is, I think, the best and most effective way to face neo-Nazis.

Can’t Turn Around

Song 369: This week on the playlist you will find It's a Little Too Late by Tanya Tucker, written by Roger Murrah and Pat Terry. (For the YouTube video, click on the title.) After last week's post in honor of Glen Campbell, who recently died, Tanya seemed like an appropriate follow-up, in light of their famous love affair. For the first 2 decades of her career, I knew very little about TT, aside from her dalliance with Campbell, so when this record came rocking along in 1992 courtesy of country radio, it surprised me, and immediately got my attention. In addition to the clever lyrics about romantic entanglement, I also really liked the drummer's wild and frenzied accompaniment, which perfectly compliments the words Tanya sings. Having been more than once in that same spot where I was too far gone to turn this heart around, I'd say that Tucker and her backup players nailed it. On a side note, this track is a final sly reference to the second verse of my own song As Long as Merle is Still Haggard, which ends with the line but after what Holly Dunn (my 5/28/17 post) you should have Tanya Tucker up. Appropriately enough, the late Mr. Haggard was also someone who had hooked up with TT, and you can find the video for my tribute to him by clicking on the title.

Pleasant Memories

Song 368: This week’s playlist track is Gentle on My Mind by Glen Campbell, written by John Hartford, and I offer the post as a tribute to a very talented singer and guitarist who died last Tuesday after an extended struggle with Alzheimer's disease. I thought this 45 sounded really good when I first starting hearing it in the early summer of 1967, and when I saw Glen perform it on TV, I thought it sounded even better. I liked the way he included a banjo in the mix, which didn't happen much at the time. The character sketched in the lyrics here helped to shape the image that I outlined in The Wanderer when I wrote that a couple of year later, in the fall of 1969, and then the following summer, as I was seeking to define my own original artistic and musical persona, I decided to learn to play and sing this tune. In so doing, I made a melodic mistake that inspired a new piece which I called Country Highway when I completed it a few days later. While I thought highly of Glen during the era when he did this record and a bunch of other memorable cuts, only in recent years did I learn of his earlier career when he performed as Brian Wilson's stand-in on a Beach Boys tour, and also recorded guitar parts for Pet Sounds and other BB discs, which increased my respect for his artistry. While GC has left the land of the living, the magic moments he created will without a doubt keep him in the backroads by the rivers of my memory, and maybe yours too.