'Us & Them' & Time & Place

Originally posted May 5, 2009

I’ve written in passing at various times about what I call “time and place” songs, songs that are so interlaced in memory that just hearing a few notes pulls me back elsewhere and elsewhen.

I think anyone who loves music has a number of songs that do that. Some of the moments my songs take me to are significant. Others are not, and I think one of the joys of time and place songs is that they remind me of the little bits of everyday life, things that would otherwise go unmarked. One that comes to mind as I write is from 1966: Rick and I were locking our bikes to the rack outside a long-gone St. Cloud discount store called Tempo when we heard the strains of the Seeker’s “Georgy Girl” coming from somewhere. For better or worse, whenever I’ve heard the song for many years, I’m back on St. Germain in the west end of downtown going to Tempo for some reason.

Probably the most potent time and place song for me is Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them,’ from Dark Side of the Moon. As soon as I hear the first notes of the long slow introduction, I’m gone. And as the introduction flows into Dick Parry’s sweet and sad saxophone solo, I’m standing in a doorway between the small lobby and the lounge at the youth hostel in Fredericia, Denmark, so many years ago. A few feet away stands the kiosk where three of our college gals earn a little spending money, selling the rest of us soda, beer, cigarettes and some snacks.

In the other direction, in the lounge, some of the kids are sitting in low-slung chairs near the fireplace, which is never used. They’re studying or reading letters from home or maybe writing their own letters back. Over by the window, a bunch of the guys are playing poker for matchsticks, and right near them, a couple more are hanging around the pinball machine. Just a normal evening in an extraordinary time.

And as the song moves on, I have the choice of digging further into the memories or pulling back and listening in the here and now. The memories are sweet, but my here and now is good, too. Either way, “Us and Them” always has that little tug, whenever I hear it. And I imagine that’s why it’s one of my favorite songs.

All-Music Guide lists just more than a hundred CDs that contain a version of “Us and Them.” Not all of those listings are of the song written by Roger Waters and Richard Wright. I’d estimate that about ninety percent are, though. And of those listings, twenty-two are recordings by Pink Floyd itself.

So that leaves about seventy listings of covers of “Us and Them,” including versions done by Between the Buried and Me, the East Star All-Stars, Ron Jones, David Ari Leon, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, German singer Nena, Out of Phase, Sarah Slean, Jeff Scott Soto, the Squirrels, Supermayor, Switch, Walt Wagner, John Wetton and Holly Wilson.

Two names intrigue me in that list: Nena and Holly Wilson. Nena, because her recording of “Us and Them” is the closer to a double album of covers, one CD of German songs and one CD in English of some of the more interesting songs of the rock era. Along with “Us and Them,” Nena tackled “Blowin’ In The Wind,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” “After the Goldrush,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” and a few more. I’m not sure I’d listen often to the German songs, but I might like the second CD of the set pretty well.

Then, there’s Holly Wilson. I know pretty much nothing about her, just that she’s a singer who likes to record songs in bossa nova style. For some reason, I’ve recently been digging into albums released during the bossa nova craze of the early 1960s, trying to decide which of the classic albums I want to add to my CD collection. In doing so, I’ve come across some interesting performers and performances. Wilson has recorded four themed albums of covers in bossa nova style in recent years, including Genesis en Bossa Nova in 2005, Queen en Bossa Nova in 2006 and Frank Sinatra en Bossa Nova in 2007. And there was the album I found, Pink Floyd en Bossa Nova, also from 2006.

The CD seems , oddly, to hold up pretty well, though at first there is a little bit of cognitive dissonance in hearing, say, the gloom of “Brain Damage” performed as a sprightly dance tune.
Seven of the ten tracks on Wilson’s Pink Floyd CD are pulled from Dark Side of the Moon, and Wilson’s interpretations of them and of the other three tracks – “Another Brick In The Wall,” Goodbye Blue Sky” and “Wish You Were Here” – make for interesting listening. One of the reasons I think the album works is that Wilson and her producers – whoever they were – made good use of electronic sounds as well as standard instrumentation. And Wilson sings them well, though she might overuse the breathy half-spoken approach a little too much.

I don’t post much that’s been released after 1999, but this was too interesting a cover to let it go.
“Us and Them” by Holly Wilson from Pink Floyd en Bossa Nova (2006) [Buy it here.]
10.11 MB mp3 at 192 kbps

Tuesday Extra
As the Texas Gal and I wandered through some garage sales Saturday, I kept my eyes open for LPs. And at one sale on the south side of the city, I found a crate full. Lots of country, some Christmas albums, a little bit of rock and pop (things I already have) and one interesting find in near mint condition.

It’s a 1982 album by a group that had eight Top 40 hits between 1958 and 1962. The covers range from “Leader of the Pack” to “Take A Chance On Me” and beyond, with the most surprising being the track I’m sharing today. I’m not going to tell you the name of the group. You’ll have to download the track to find that out. And I’m using Boxnet for this particular mp3 so you can listen to it right away.

“Whip It” (By Alvin & The Chipmunks)
3.6 MB mp3 at 192 kbps

Modern English, Bruce Springsteen, Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes & Neil Young

June 25, 2009

As long as I mentioned Modern English and “I Melt With You” yesterday, I thought I’d look for the original video. I think this is it.



Here’s a live performance of “None But The Brave” by Bruce Springsteen with the Max Weinberg 7. It took place at the Convention Hall in Asbury Park, N.J., on December 7, 2003.



And continuing to be fortunate, I found a live performance of “I’ve Been Working Too Hard” – with side excursions into “Little Queenie” and “Can I Get A Witness” – by Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes from a 1992 concert at the Music Hall in Cologne, Germany.



And here’s a Farm Aid ’86 performance of “Comes A Time” by Neil Young with harmony vocals from – I believe – the late Nicolette Larson.



As for tomorrow, I’ve got a couple of Jim Horn albums in the pile to rip, and a few other things that might be interesting. I’ve also got a little bit of an itch to see what was going on in, oh, 1961 or 1962 around this time of year. I’ll figure it out tomorrow morning.

Clutter & Stuff & Things

Originally posted August 5, 2009:

A long-time friend stopped by for dinner the other evening. We talked about our cats (five between the two households) and about K’s work in online education – she teaches students all over the world from her home in Nevada. We talked about our families and about the Texas Gal’s current college coursework. We talked a bit about books, and we shared the nuggets of news that folks do when they’re catching up.

As we were dipping into dessert, K began to look around the dining room/library, then craned her neck to peer into the living room. “Where are they?” she asked.

I was puzzled. “Where are what?”

“The penguins.”

I laughed. For years, I collected penguins, mostly ceramic, and at one point – when I lived in Minot, North Dakota – had a collection of about twenty-five, maybe thirty. I also had penguin bathroom accessories – wastebasket, shower curtain and soap dish – and there were other penguin things around my home.

It was an accidental collection. In 1976 or so, I was sharing pictures from my time in Denmark with my then-fiancée’s family. One of the pictures was of a fountain on the pedestrian mall in downtown Fredericia, a fountain decorated with statues of penguins. My future mother-in-law thought it was odd that I’d take a picture of something so prosaic; from then on, during nearly every visit to her home before and during my marriage to her daughter, she gave me a ceramic penguin figurine or something with penguins on it. The collection grew, and other folks – family and friends – gave me occasional gifts of penguin stuff.

I liked my penguins, and I happily displayed them in two homes in Monticello and then in my apartment in Minot, after the marriage had ended with a sigh of exhaustion. I think that’s where K saw them, during one of her visits to Minot. I might also have had them on display in my next place, in Anoka, Minnesota, where she was a regular dinner guest.

But the penguins are no longer on display. I’m not even sure where the collection is, whether it’s in a box nested in another box on the shelves in the basement or whether I gave them away sometime in the past twenty years. I still have a few penguinish things: A stapler, four newer figurines on the mantel, a sweet powder blue Pittsburgh Penguins cap and a few other items here and there. But my days of collecting all things penguin are gone. I do wonder a little bit about the whereabouts of the ceramic penguins. Some of them were quite nice, and I imagine some had some value as collectibles. But I honestly don’t remember what I did with them.

They were, after all, just things. Nice things, yes, but just things. And as I thought about my penguins this week, I also thought – and not for the first time – about how we here in the U.S. have let our things become so important to us. We collect, accumulate and want more things, whether they’re automobiles, backyard decks, bracelets, books, cookware sets, CDs, sweaters, power boats, coffee-makers or any of the other desirable things with which we seem to clutter our lives..

Clutter? Yeah, sometimes – a lot of the time – I think so. We’re not rich, the Texas Gal and I. But we sometimes look around our home and realize how much stuff we have, stuff that decorates our lives and makes them more pleasant. It’s nice to have those things, but in the end, they’re not essential. They’re things. I sometimes think that we can examine our priorities by thinking about what we would make sure to take out of our homes if they were on fire.

Even during the times I had them on display, my penguin figurines would have been far down that list. What’s at the top of the list? Obviously, the Texas Gal and the three cats come first. Then the box that contains documents like our birth certificates, marriage license and so on. Then would come our financial records, which we’ve made easily accessible and portable. Then, if there were time, the Texas Gal would probably grab as many of our photos as she could, and I’d grab my journal from my year in Denmark and my external hard drive, where I keep my writing projects (as well as my mp3s). In a fire, I think we’d be lucky to get that much. And if all we got out was ourselves and the cats, well, the rest of it – all of it, no matter how dear some of it may be to us – is just things.

Are those things irreplaceable? Some of them truly are, and we would grieve those losses. But in the end, we’d be safe and whole and they’re just things.

A Six-Pack Of Things
“A Thing Going On” by J.J. Cale from Grasshopper [1982]
“You’re The Best Thing” by the Style Council from Cafe Bleu [1984]
“All These Things We Dream” by the Living Daylights from The Living Daylights [1996]
“Bags and Things” by Dennis Lambert from Bags and Things [1972]
“Things Yet To Come” by Sweathog from Sweathog [1971]
“If It Ain't One Thing It's Another” by the Staple Singers from City in the Sky [1974]

All I’m going to say about these songs today is that, even though a couple of them are by lesser-known artists, they’re all worth hearing.

Some Indexing Information

The post for Vinyl Record Day 2009 called for more tags than Blogger allows. So people looking for references to Mark Turnbull, Lori Jacobs or the Chipmunks, see the adjacent post for August 12, 2009.

Saturday Single No. 148

Originally posted September 12, 2009:

I never did get to looking at August LP acquisitions in the years after 1989; time and circumstance have made that idea bit outdated. Perhaps when August turns our way again, I’ll recall and then remedy that omission. On the other hand, there may be more vibrant things about which to write when the eighth month comes to call next summer.

And the first September Saturday has slid past without my marking it here. I was – as regulars know – taking a few days off to move my figurative stuff here to WordPress. So I thought we’d just jump over August and see what records came my way in September, starting this week with the years from 1964 through 1989. (Some of these will be among the most enduring records in my collection, as my birthday falls in this month, and my family and friends have generally had a good idea of what I’d like.)

My first album, as I’ve noted here more than once, was Al Hirt’s Honey In The Horn, which showed up on the turntable early one morning in 1964. A year later, Sonny and Cher’s Look At Us occupied the same space. During the summer of 1967, I spent a week at a band camp on the campus of what was then Bemidji State College, nestled among the pines of Northern Minnesota; in September, I received in the mail an LP made up of the various bands’ performances during that week’s culminating concert.

The Beatles’ Revolver, an album I consider either the best or second-best that group ever recorded (it changes places with Abbey Road in my internal rankings), came my way in September 1970. And then we jump to 1974, when I picked up on a September evening the first of the two Duane Allman anthologies.

In 1977, having tentatively entered the workforce, I found a used copy of the Moody Blues’ Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, and later that month, I bought from a co-worker three albums: Seals & Crofts’ Greatest Hits, Linda Ronstadt’s Greatest Hits and Michael Johnson’s There is a Breeze. (The latter was quite possibly the final step toward collecting all the music we had listened to in the lounge during my stay in Denmark four years earlier.)

I found myself from time to time dipping into classical music, sometimes purchasing recordings of pieces I played as part of the St. Cloud Tech High School Orchestra, other times just trying something new. During a shopping trip to the Twin Cities in September 1978, I found a sale on classical recordings; I bought two records, one of Ludwig van Beethoven’s famed Symphony No. 5, and one of Wolfgang Mozart’s Symphonies No. 40 and No. 41. Three years later, in September 1981, I added a collection of George Gershwin pieces to the classical shelf, and then put a copy of the Moody Blues’ Long Distance Voyager on the main shelf.

For some reason, September in the earlier years isn’t a month jammed with lots of record acquisitions. An accident of timing, I guess. We move forward several years – and several life changes – to 1987, when my birthday brought me Dan Fogelberg’s Nether Lands and the soundtrack to the movie Stand By Me (a record packed with fine music from the latter years of the 1950s). Later that month, I’d add John Wesley Harding, a great album, and Real Live, an okay album, to my growing collection of the works of Bob Dylan.

September of 1988 was a different story. I added thirty-eight LPs to the shelves that month, with the most interesting of them being maybe a clutch of records by the Grateful Dead: Aoxomoxoa, The Grateful Dead and Workingman’s Dead. The least of those September records? Well, there were a couple of anthologies that might have been half-good, but I’d say that chief among the records that didn’t age well were Luna Sea by Firefall and Bonnie Tyler’s Faster Than The Speed Of Night.

A year later, I bought only a few records in September (having binged in July and August). During a trip to visit a lady friend in Kansas, I spent some money in Wichita on a few Gordon Lightfoot albums, one Gram Parsons, a copy of the early Beatles album, Introducing the Beatles on Vee Jay (an album that’s almost certainly a fake printed long after the fact, as are most supposed copies of the Vee Jay record these days), a Sly & the Family Stone album and the charity extravaganza We Are The World. Back in Minnesota, I found the History of Eric Clapton, every track of which I had on other Clapton albums, and Roxy Music’s brilliant Avalon, introducing myself finally to the British band.

And that’s a nice place to stop for a Saturday Single.

“More Than This” by Roxy Music from Avalon [1982]

Literally Out Of Touch

Originally posted October 22, 2009:

I arose a little later than usual yesterday, as I’ve been battling a stubborn cold, and came into the study to check a few blogs and prepare a post. As the computer booted, I picked up the phone to tell the Texas Gal – already at work – that I was breathing and upright.

No dial tone.

I went to the front rooms and tried that phone. No dial tone there. So I went back to the study, planning on sending an instant message or an email. We had no ’Net access, either. I clicked on the TV, got a picture and sound and assumed that was okay. (That was an error: It turned out that most of our cable channels were down, too.) Now I really needed to talk to the Texas Gal as well as the cable company.

We gave up our cell phones a while back, so I drove down to the neighborhood convenience store. There, hunching my shoulders against a light rain, I dropped a couple of quarters into the pay phone. The Texas Gal said she’d call the cable company and told me to go home and get in out of the rain. An hour or so later, she came home for a few moments and said that a service tech would stop by during the early afternoon.

And actually, two of them did, with the second of them bearing the unwelcome news that our services would not be restored until sometime around two in the morning. He said that we were one of nine customers affected by an equipment failure, but making the ten-minute repair would require disconnecting about three hundred customers. So his bosses, he said, had told him not to repair the fault; instead, a truck would come out sometime after midnight and take care of the problem.

It was a perfectly sound business decision, but it was still annoying and a little worrying. Missing the high end cable channels for a day was no big deal. Nor was being offline, I thought. But being without a phone in case of emergency? That wasn’t good, and I told the fellow that. He nodded. “I understand,” he said. “And I’ll pass the word on. But I can’t do anything about it.”

I nodded back, and after he left, I went and found my deactivated cell phone. I think – though I’m not certain – that even deactivated phones can call 911. So I charged the phone and put it on the dining room table just in case the worst occurred. It didn’t. We had a pleasant evening: some television, some reading and, for me, a little bit of tabletop baseball. As pleasant as the evening turned out to be though, not having Net access was a major annoyance: Both of us missed our normal online activities. No email or Facebook, no new blog posts to read, no way to check my fantasy football teams or the Texas Gal’s quilting group. And that pointed out to us how large a part of our lives the online world has become. It’s amazing how, in a relatively brief bit of time, we’re living so much of our lives online.

Is that worrisome? Not so long as we can do without if we have to. The things that the ’Net brings to our lives are worthwhile, fun and maybe even important. But they’re not essential. (That holds true, too, for the high-end cable channels. The telephone is another story, I think.) Still, even thought I was out of touch for only a day, it’s good to be back.

A Six-Pack of Communications
“Telephone Line” by the Electric Light Orchestra, United Artists 1000 [1976]
“57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)” by Bruce Springsteen from Human Touch [1992]
“(I’m A) TV Savage” by Bow Wow Wow from I Want Candy [1982]
“Race of the Computers” by Pete Carr from Not A Word On It [1976]
“TV Mama” by Big Joe Turner, Atlantic 1016 [1953]
“Pick Up The Phone” by Lesley Duncan from Moonbathing [1975]

The first two of these are pretty well-known, I think, and Bow Wow Wow is, too, though maybe this track is less well-known than some of that odd band’s other music. (Sorry for the low bitrate on that one, but it’s all I had.)

Pete Carr’s name is more familiar as a session guitarist at Muscle Shoals than as a solo artist, but Not A Word On It is a pretty good solo album. All-Music Guide has a date of 1975 for the record, but I’ve seen 1976 in other places I trust, so I’m going with that. (Thanks to walknthabass at Gooder'n Bad Vinyl.)

Big Joe Turner, one of the premier blues shouters, recorded from the 1930s into the 1980s, but seems almost forgotten today. “TV Mama,” recorded when television was still very new, is an example of using the most recent fad or craze as a framework for a salacious bit of music. (I ripped this from a library collection long before I ever thought about bitrates, so this track, too, is at a lower bitrate than I normally share.)

Lesley Duncan was a top session vocalist in England during the 1970s and released a few solo albums that were critically praised but didn’t sell all that well, from what I can tell. “Pick Up The Phone” is a nice piece of mid-1970s pop; if you like it, you’ll like the rest of Moonbathing as well as Duncan’s other work, I think.

Saturday Single No. 160

Originally posted November 21, 2009:

Two weeks ago, before my tabletop baseball break, I looked at the LPs I’d acquired in November from 1964 through 1989. Today, we’ll pick up the tale of Novembers from there. (For those who are interested, Rob won the Strat-O-Matic tournament for the fourth year in a row, this time with the 1922 Giants, who swept two games in the finals from my 1948 Indians.)

November of 1990 found me teaching journalism in Columbia, Missouri, which I enjoyed. I knew the city from having lived there a few years earlier, but for some reason, I wasn’t haunting the used record stores too much. I did get LPs by Karla Bonoff, Danny O’Keefe and Jud Strunk in November of that year, but that’s about all the record buying I did that autumn.

A year later, as I settled into my job in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, I got no LPs in November, but I made up for it a year later. November of 1992 brought me one of the windfalls I mentioned a while back: A charity based in Eden Prairie called Bridging, Inc., frequently got boxes of records – which it could not use – among its donations of household items. I knew the director, and for a few years, he’d call me when he had records for me to take away. I kept some, sold some (with Bridging getting a share of the take) and generally had to toss those in very bad shape. The November 1992 box from Bridging contained LPs by, among others, America, Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, Stephen Bishop, Waylon Jennings, Michael Jackson and Edward R. Murrow. There were also a lot of K-Tel and Ronco compilations. On my own that month, I picked up LPs by Wet Willie, Dr. John and John Fogerty and a collection of Bruce Springsteen covers, bringing the month’s total to twenty-nine records.

I skipped three more Novembers for some reason, and then got back to business in 1996. The take was minimal, though: LPs by Clannad, Dion & the Belmonts, Carl Perkins and Mother Earth, and a new copy of Springsteen’s The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle. By the time November rolled around again, in 1997, I was heading into the years of what I call vinyl madness, with stops at Cheapo’s at least three times a week: I brought home twenty-five records that month. The best of them? Isaac Hayes’ Hot Buttered Soul, Taj Mahal’s Giant Step/De Ole Folks At Home, and maybe the Who’s Live at Leeds. The least satisfying? Almost certainly one of the K-Tel anthologies I grabbed. Otherwise, it was a good month.

I more than doubled my November take the next year, bringing home fifty-seven records in 1998’s next-to-last month; among them were LPs by Poco, Rodney Crowell, Robert Cray, Harry Belafonte, Emitt Rhodes, William Bell, Nilsson, Fleetwood Mac, Clarence Carter, Bonnie Bramlett, Don Nix, Louis Jordan, Clannad, Malo and Mason Profitt. The best? Maybe War’s The World is a Ghetto or Live at the Regal by B.B. King. The least of them? Probably Night Flight by Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues. The most interesting? I’d say it’s In The Shadow Of The Mountain on the Nonesuch label, a collection of Bulgarian choral music, which to this day I find eminently fascinating.

In November of 1999, I almost equaled the previous year’s take, with fifty-six LPs. They included works by Sam & Dave, Elmore James, the Yarbirds, Carole King, UB40, Jimi Hendrix, Bonnie Koloc, Dave Grusin, Joe Jackson, Dave Mason, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Cris Williamson, Caravan, the Byrds, the Indigo Girls and Phoebe Snow. The best of the month was either Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison or the Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday. The least satisfying? Probably the Eagles’ The Long Run, and I’m not at all sure why.

Things tailed off from there, as I got a CD player, I met the Texas Gal and then moved, first to the ’burbs and then to St. Cloud. In November 2000, I found records by Ringo Starr, Steeleye Span and Bonnie Bramlett. In 2001, I brought home an LP by folksinger Kate Wolf. In 2002, I found a record by Dave Porter of Sam & Dave. And there the tale of Novembers ends.

So what to share? Well, I’m tempted to offer a track from In The Shadow Of The Mountain, but I’m aware my interest in Bulgarian choral music isn’t one that a lot of folks share. So I pulled out of the stacks a 1984 LP titled Cover Me, the collection of Springsteen covers I mentioned above. The first track was originally found on Dave Edmunds’ 1982 album, D.E. 7 th, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

“From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)” by Dave Edmunds from Cover Me [1984]

Now Be Thankful

Originally posted November 25, 2009:

Well, tomorrow morning, like millions of others here in the U.S., the Texas Gal and I – joined by my mother – will head off for Thanksgiving. In our case, we’ll be going to my sister’s home in the Twin Cities suburb of Maple Grove for turkey dinner with all the trimmings. Our contribution will be a plate of deviled eggs, a dish that’s become a holiday tradition for us since the Texas Gal first brought them along in 2000.

We missed Thanksgiving at my sister’s last year due to some health issues. And the plan to return there got me thinking about the various places I’ve celebrated Thanksgiving over the years.

For years – until I was out of college, I think – we gathered at my grandparents’ home, first on their farm outside the small town of Lamberton, Minnesota, and then at their home in Lamberton itself. Sometime in the mid-1970s, after Grandma passed on, the Thanksgiving celebration shifted to my parents’ home here in St. Cloud. And after about twenty years there, the annual feast shifted venues again, and my sister and brother-in-law have hosted Thanksgiving since then.

Besides last year’s celebration, I can recall two other Thanksgivings that have found me in different places. In 1980, I think it was, the woman who was then my wife had the idea of hosting Thanksgiving in a restored 1860s cabin owned by friends of hers. We prepared the food in our own home and then moved the entire feast about two miles to the cabin. The food was fine, but the cabin was uncomfortably cold despite the presence of a fireplace. It was an interesting experiment, but I’d rather flip it: I’d be interested in using Nineteenth Century recipes and work from a modern kitchen.

The other Thanksgiving that found me in another place was during the time I spent in Denmark. The Danes don’t celebrate the holiday, of course, but my ladyfriend – another American – and I decided to cook a traditional American Thanksgiving meal for my Danish family and a few other students, both American and Danish.

There was no turkey for sale in Fredericia, so we made do with a couple of chickens. Potatoes were easy enough, as was flour for the gravy. Green beans amandine went well enough after a tussle with the Danish language. Not knowing where the nutcracker was, I looked up the word in my Danish/English dictionary and called my Danish mother at her office. Danish uses some sounds that are, well, foreign to English, so it took some time before she understood that I was trying to say nøddeknækker.

Beyond the linguistic difficulties, the main challenge of the day was the pumpkin pie. We could find neither canned pumpkin nor a fresh pumpkin in Fredericia. Luckily, my ladyfriend had made pumpkin pie from scratch with her mother, and she assured me that an orange winter squash would meet our needs. We cleaned it, cut it up and cooked it with the appropriate seasonings and then baked it in a homemade shell. As dinner came to a close that evening, our Danish guests were a bit puzzled by the pie, but our American guests marveled at how close we’d come to the Thanksgiving dessert they’d all had for years.

That may have been my most memorable Thanksgiving ever. Does that mean it was the best? Well, no. As the fourth Thursday of November comes along year after year, each Thanksgiving somehow seems better than the one before it . . . as long as I share that table with my loved ones, especially the Texas Gal.

A Six-Pack of Thanks
“Now Be Thankful” by Fairport Convention, Island WIP 6089 [1970]
“Thank You” by Led Zeppelin from Led Zeppelin II [1969]
“I Thank You” by Mongo Santamaria from All Strung Out [1969]
“Thank You For The Promises” by Gordon Lightfoot from Shadows [1982]
‘Thanks to You” by Jesse Winchester from Humour Me [1988]
“Be Thankful for What You Got (Pt. 1)” by William DeVaughn, Roxbury 0236 [1974]

Of these six, only the Fairport Convention tune really seems to fully address the sentiments of the holiday. The others generally work with only their titles; their content has at best only a glancing connection to the day. But that’s good enough for me.

The Texas Gal and I wish you a joyful Thanksgiving. May you all have many reasons to be thankful.

December 1982: Music On The Bus

Originally posted December 30, 2009:

I spent much of my time during the last week of 1982 riding on buses, and it was one of more fun weeks of my life. I was accompanying – and covering for the Monticello newspaper – the Monticello High School marching band as it toured Southern California and prepared to march in Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses Parade on New Year’s Day, 1983.

During that week, we did a lot of the standard Southern California things: Universal Studios, a Hollywood bus tour, the Farmers’ Market, Sea World in San Diego and Disneyland. The band marched during the daily parade during our day at Walt Disney’s brainchild, and the band also performed during a men’s basketball game between the University of Southern California and Georgetown University. (That Georgetown team was led by Patrick Ewing, who would lead the Hoyas to the NCAA championship during the following season, 1983-84.)

And the band marched the long Tournament of Roses parade on New Year’s Day, bringing to its small-town high school in Minnesota one of the most sparkling accolades a marching band can ever earn. That meant, of course, that I got to see the parade from a front-row seat set aside for photographers. I had to work – getting as many shots as I could – during the forty-five or so seconds it took the Monticello band to march past my position. Other than that, I could sit back and enjoy the parade.

(About six of the men on the trip – me, my editor and four high school faculty members – ended the trip’s activities by taking in Rose Bowl game between Michigan and UCLA. As was its habit in those days, Michigan lost the game. But the highlight of the afternoon for me was seeing the Wolverine band march across the field in its big block M, playing the best college fight song in the land, “The Victors.”)

All of those activities meant a lot of time on the bus, heading from our hotel in Newport Beach to those various points. And where teens go, of course, goes music, and in those days before iPods allowed each person his or her own personal playlist, that meant a radio. So as we meandered along Hollywood Boulevard, as we found our way to Disneyland, as we headed south along the freeway to San Diego, and everywhere we went, the bus I was on had a radio playing the current hits of the day.

That’s why hearing almost any tune that was on the radio during the last week of 1982 triggers memories: The kids stepping into footprints left in cement by movie stars at Mann’s Chinese Theatre. The view from the stage at the Hollywood Bowl. Dolphins posing for a picture at Sea World. Fireworks over the Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland. And, too, the gasps of shock from a cluster of Midwestern boys when they realized that the cute Hollywood Boulevard gal they’d been waving to from the bus wasn’t really a gal at all.

Here are five tunes that can trigger some of those memories and one that’s just too good to pass up.

A Six-Pack From The Charts (Billboard Hot 100, December 25, 1982)
“The Girl Is Mine” by Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney (No. 3)
“Sexual Healing” by Marvin Gaye (No. 8)
“Africa” by Toto (No. 14)
“Rock the Casbah” by the Clash (No. 15)
“Love In Store” by Fleetwood Mac (No. 27)
“Forever” by Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul (No. 81)

I know I heard the first four of these as I rode that bus around Southern California during that last week of 1982. And I think we heard the Fleetwood Mac single, maybe on our longest ride of that week, from Newport Beach to San Diego. I’m certain, however, that we didn’t hear “Forever” by Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul.

“The Girl Is Mine” was in its eighth week in the Hot 100, and it would peak at No. 2 on the chart from January 8, 1983. (That was the next chart issued, as Billboard decided not to issue a chart on January 1, 1983.) The record did hit No. 1 on the R&B and Adult Contemporary charts, though. As for me, I thought the record was pleasant; it was sweet and melodic, and Jackson’s and McCartney’s voices blended well. But it was also lightweight enough that I doubt that it would end up ranked among the best bits of work in the career of either man.

“Sexual Healing” was Marvin Gaye’s last hit, pulled from Midnight Love, the last album Gaye recorded before his death in 1984. The record went to No. 3, and on the R&B chart it held the No. 1 spot for ten weeks. The record’s success, says Jason Elias of All-Music Guide, was understandable: “It was the perfect time . . . Al Green had gone to church, Prince was too weird, and Teddy Pendergrass was still recovering from his near-fatal crash. Music had been missing this kind of mix of sex, humor, and romance.”

My sense of Toto at the time – and for years to come, as it happens – was that the band didn’t get much respect. Made up of studio pros, Toto ended up with ten Top 40 hits from 1978 through 1988, and if some of them were carefully crafted to climb the charts, well, so they were. And so they did. I confess to not having any Toto in my collection during the early 1980s, but then, I wasn’t buying stuff by other new bands, either. But I liked “Africa” right from the start, and I still do. The single spent sixteen weeks in the Top 40, one of them at No. 1. And I have a sense that Toto sounds a lot better these days than a lot of things that were coming out of the speakers in 1982.

I didn’t get the Clash at the time or for a long time after. Among the excess records I got during the early 1990s from my friend Fran at Bridging Inc. were near-mint copies of London Calling, Sandinista! and Combat Rock. I sold ’em all, not yet plugged into the group’s aesthetic (and not yet committed to creating a rock archive in my living room). I still don’t listen often to the group’s work, but I now understand the historical and musical trends that brought the Clash its attitude and sound. All of that means that I quite like “Rock the Casbah” and a few of the group’s other efforts. “Casbah” was the group’s second hit – after “Train In Vain (Stand By Me)” went to No. 23 in 1980 – and peaked at No. 8 during a fifteen-week stay in the Top 40.

“Love In Store” came from Fleetwood Mac’s Mirage album, its studio follow-up to the idiosyncratic Tusk. (A live album was released and went to No. 14 on the album chart between the two studio efforts). Had Tusk scared off the less-committed listeners who’d bought the group’s mid-1970s chart-topping albums as if they’d held the secrets to perpetual bliss? Not at all. Mirage went to No. 1 as well and stayed there for five weeks. “Love In Store” peaked at No. 22, the third single from Mirage (after “Hold Me” and “Gypsy”) to hit the Top 40.

The Little Steven who fronted the Disciples of Soul was, of course, Steve Van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. All-Music Guide notes that while Springsteen was working on Born in the U.S.A., Van Zandt gathered in a group of like-minded musicians and put together Men Without Women, which Mark Deming of AMG calls “the finest album the Asbury Jukes never made.” Deming continues: “Like the Jukes [sic] best work, Men Without Women blends the muscle and swagger of Jersey shore rock & roll with the horn-fueled heart and soul of classic R&B, and here Van Zandt was willing to push himself further in both directions at once.” As a single, “Forever” got to No. 63 and stayed there for two weeks during an eight-week stay in the Hot 100.

Four of these are album tracks and thus may differ from the singles that were getting airplay. “Africa” as presented here is shorter than the album track, and I think it’s the single mix, but as I no longer recall where I got it, I cannot say for certain. Nor do I recall where I got the Marvin Gaye track, but based on running time, I’m guessing without certainty that it’s the track from the album Midnight Love and not the single edit.

My thanks to the proprietor of Barely Awake In Frog Pajamas for his own post about riding a bus during school days that accompanied some tunes from late 1982. His memories triggered my own, and I’m grateful for that.

Where Do We Find Our Comfort?

Originally posted January 04, 2010:

Sometime during the holiday weekend, I stopped at It’s Psych, a music board that generally focuses on the music of the 1960s and 1970s. One of my fellow music fans had posted an interesting question:

“You've just had one of those days. You know . . . On such occasions what album or group of songs do you turn to for comfort or just escape?”

It’s an interesting question. And there were some interesting answers posted before I got there. Among the albums suggested were Beatles For Sale; Tin Tin’s 1970 work, Astral Taxi; Emitt Rhodes’ self-titled album from 1970 and Nick Lowe's Pure Pop For Now People.

Some singles were mentioned, too. A few of them were “The Letter” by the Box Tops, “Friday On My Mind” by the Easybeats, “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” by Harper’s Bizarre, “Everything Is Sunshine” by the Hollies, “Spirit In The Sky” by Norman Greenbaum, “Downtown” by Petula Clark, “Jam Up Jelly Tight” by Tommy Roe, “Hooked On A Feeling” by Blue Swede and “Sit Down I Think I Love You” by the Buffalo Springfield.

A couple of readers suggested, without naming albums or individual tracks, music from the Jam, the English Beat, the Doors, the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith.

And one poster said, “And then there is the one song that has almost never failed to cheer me up: “Here Comes The Sun” by the Beatles. I have heard it 100’s of times and it rarely fails. In fact the whole Abbey Road album is something of a comfort . . . Not sure why.”

I felt compelled, of course, to add my nickel’s worth of comment to the thread. I began: “If I’m really in sad shape, I head for my small classical library. I don't want anything with lyrics on really bad days.”

And that’s true. Among the classical pieces I turn to are Antonín Dvorák’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor “From The New World” as well as Dvorák’s Slavonic Dances; Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor; Johann Sebastian Bach’s series of Brandenburg Concerti; Bedrich Smetana’s “Vltava” (also called “The Moldau”); Johannes Brahms’ Hungarian Dances and that marvelous warhorse of the classical repertoire, Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.”

There are plenty of other classical pieces and composers whose work I enjoy, but those listed are the ones I turn to for comfort on those days when . . . well, when words bring no solace.

But, I added in my post, “If I'm just a little blue, well, these are some of the old friends” I turn to:

The Band by The Band
Second Contribution by Shawn Phillips
Trouble No More by Darden Smith
Bare Trees by Fleetwood Mac
Tango in the Night by Fleetwood Mac
Tunnel of Love by Bruce Springsteen
Hard Again by Muddy Waters
The London Howlin' Wolf Sessions
All Things Must Pass by George Harrison (“Apple Jam” excluded)
East of Midnight by Gordon Lightfoot
Shadows by Gordon Lightfoot
Naturally by J.J. Cale
and
pretty much anything by Richie Havens

None of those will be a surprise to anyone who’s spent much time reading this blog over the past few years. (Well, maybe Tango in the Night, which kind of surprised me when it popped into my head as I compiled the list.) There certainly are other albums that would serve the same purpose. But these are the ones that I thought of as I was making the list, and that kind of immediate recall says something to me about these albums’ importance to me.

Most of the specific albums listed there are easily available on CD. Three seem to be out of print: Darden Smith’s Trouble No More and the two Gordon Lightfoot albums. I shared Trouble No More and East of Midnight some time ago (and the time might come for a re-up of those), so today, it’s time to look at Shadows.

Released in 1982, it’s a moody album, right from the blurry and – appropriately – shadowed portrait of Lightfoot on the cover. That portrait sets a tone, and it’s a tone that carries on through the album. Of the eleven songs on the album, nine are invested with sorrow or at least a tinge of melancholy. The only songs that seems anything close to cheerful are the sailing tune “Triangle” and possibly “Blackberry Wine.”

But – and this is the album’s puzzle – the sorrow that pervades the album isn’t filled with grief. Rather, the sense I get from Lightfoot’s lyrics and his performance is a stoic acceptance that sorrow is his rightful companion:

From “Baby Step Back”
“Now it looks to me like the same old place
“In the sky it looks like rain
“The same old town with the same old streets
“My address has not changed
“You can find me there
“With the door shut tight
“And the one wish that remains
“Baby step back, baby step back
“Either step up or step back”

From “I’ll Do Anything”
“Down in the warm dark part of my heart you stay
“I’ve been on my own so long as I stand here today
“I’d never leave you
“I’d do anything you say
“I’ve been around some, walking down on the street
“Feeling as low as the shoes on the soles of my feet
“Taking dead aim on fortune and fame, you might say
“Playing guitar doesn’t make you a star anyway.”

Even the love songs on Shadows are subdued:

From “Shadows”
“Let me reach out love and touch you
“Let me hold you for a while
“I’ve been all around the world
“Oh, how I long to see you smile
“There’s a shadow on the moon
“And the waters here below do not shine the way they should
“And I love you, just in case you didn’t know.
“Let it go
“Let it happen like it happened once before
“It’s a wicked wind, and it chills me to the bone
“And if you do not believe me, come and gaze upon the shadow at your door.”

From my favorite, “Thank You For The Promises”
“Thank you for the promises we make
“I know I can’t complain
“I think I did all right
“No failures are in sight
“Only now and then
“I like to reminisce
“Do you remember when?”

“Even if we’re angels we can’t ask
“To wander through the past”
“The future is our goal
“The night is black as coal
“If I could pay the price
“I’d like to love you once
“I’d love to love you twice.”

Maybe I’m reading too much into some slightly vague lyrics. But the musical mood of the album is somber as well, with lots of minor chords, some atmospheric production touches from Lightfoot and co-producer Ken Friesen, and Lightfoot’s frequently plaintive voice.

So how is it that this is an album that brings me comfort? I’m not sure, what with the sense of sorrow that, to my ears, blankets most of the album. Perhaps that sense, along with the stoicism I mentioned earlier, brought me some time ago to a conclusion I’m only now putting into words: Sorrow is the residue that remains after full grief has gone.

Otherwise, all I can say is that we take our comfort where we find it.

Tracks:
14 Karat Gold
In My Fashion
Shadows
Blackberry Wine
Heaven Help The Devil
Thank You For The Promises
Baby Step Back
All I’m After
Triangle
I’ll Do Anything
She’s Not The Same

Shadows by Gordon Lightfoot [1982]