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Posts Tagged ‘1980s’

Post-it Sextet #6: Six Months In A Leaky Boat

Posted in Music, My Life's Rich Pageant, tagged , , , on July 25, 2020| 1 Comment »

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I remember you by

thunderclap in the sky

The feelings that surge in this one, more than any of our previous five Post-its. A certain M introduced me to Split Enz on those two celebrated mix tapes, and a certain L will forever come to mind first when I hear this group sing, as they do here more than almost anywhere else.

If you’re wondering what this is all about.

This is the most visceral of my Post-its, thunderclap in the sky, for me, someone who celebrates rainstorms, and used to thrill over being caught in them in grad school in Virginia, leaving the library as they moved in, being drenched while walking, then simply changing clothes when I got back to my apartment. Another time there, one struck at 8 or 9 pm and I dodged lightning bolts escaping my office with a female colleague of mine, we two laughing it up under a small wooden pavilion when we needed a break. Then there’s the morning thunderstorm when I was drawn to driving out to a great marsh and watching nature take its course seemingly ignoring the weather in what many imperceptive humans would describe as hell all round.

And then there’s that Louis MacNeice poem that led to a story with the same title.

Some memories of storms, and though I am more conscious now, sadly, of the chance of being struck by lightning, I still hope to be caught in them despite my mutated self. This song invariably brings me to L. The thunderclap of the lyric makes me think of her every time, so, it’s the lyric, the song, that brings her to me, not an actual thunder. It’s all the same—she reappears to me in moments to treasure. The venture I took to go out and see her: tyranny of distance didn’t stop the cavalier.

* * *

This song is part of what I call a “hat trick.” This is a misnomer, but trifecta sounds too cheap, trilogy to lumbering. In hockey, not that I am a fan of that either, a hat trick is three goals scored in one game by the same player. I have co-opted the phrase to mean a span on an album where three songs in a row sustain a rarefied air, something well above and beyond, ten minutes of bliss. Why this matters I am not sure, but it’s hard to sustain such excellence and I make mental notes whenever I notice one. One the brain’s many parlour games. Time to share.

The practice started with Split Enz’ first album, Mental Notes, where three songs near the album’s end reach that peak, one I’m not sure has ever been matched. The hat trick we’re talking about today is not as intense, but the song “Six Months In A Leaky Boat” was prefaced by an instrumental called “Pioneer” on the Split Enz collection where I first heard it; and this was as it was on the Time and Tide album release. “Pioneer” sets the stage with smooth, swirling synth zest for “Six Months” and its video which has a touching, albeit outdated, nostalgia to it, bringing to mind initial contact and lost love.

The song is followed on Time and Tide by the first Split Enz I ever heard, “Haul Away.” This was on the mix tape M made for me, the one that introduced me to so much music of my future and present. So from “Pioneer” to “Six Months” to “Haul Away” it is a fantastic, very personal hat trick, even a triptych. (Maybe I should be calling these triptychs, but triptych implies a feature piece flanked by two lesser.) How the songs fold into one another: the instrumental setting the stage, the big impact of the main song, then the jaunty jig of a “nervous breakdown” ending things. More than ever, I feel the “lapping at my heels,” “love goes all wrong,” “it’s all we can do to carry on.” Listening to them all again yesterday, it’s amazing all the loving detail that goes into music, all eventually swept away by Time and Tide as the world stops listening and moves on to something new.

(Maybe I should go with three hares instead of hat trick. I am reading Watership Down for my big summer novel this year. That is a more circular symbol, though. But maybe that’s fitting for someone like me whose internal life is like being on a merry-go-round.)

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Post-it Sextet #5: You Tell Me

Posted in Music, My Life's Rich Pageant, tagged , on July 17, 2020| Leave a Comment »

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The Go-Betweens, another group I could write a volume on, or at least threaten to. Links to a handful of people in my life, with initials like M, J, S, A, L, R.

Your hair frames

the perfect face…

It seems it is actually “a” perfect face, but “the” is more unique, is it not? And that’s how I heard it. Another beautiful thought and image, matching the freshness, almost naiveté amid the sad experience, of the Go-Betweens last two albums, Tallulah and 16 Lovers Lane, where romance and diminishing romance shared the space with four of the band members. I always pictured this face as almost literally framed by the bobbed or flipped hair I admired from my 1920s phase that I’m not sure has ended.

“You Tell Me” has those rare, ethereal high harmonies of Waterloo Sunset. And, the beauty, the confidence of the woman being sung about: “Then you tell me, I have a choice, you you, you you.” The album is named after her—Tallulah.

And I remember one of those afore-initialed people in my life telling me her favorite line in the song—can you guess it? There was the drive to a wine-tasting that took place under a tent in summer rain with a shaggy dog dashing around the grounds and a little jazz combo. Many many little Go-Betweens memories.

Too bad to some now it’s a textbook, with a cool cover at least. Feeling the songs naturally as they came along into my life, that was remarkable and why they’ve had such an impact.

Driving one recent day, thinking about these associations, another interfered when “Brown Eyed Girl” came on the radio. I think we all know that gorgeous masterpiece, still strong although I’d heard it multiple times nightly for a solid year blaring outside a bar across a creek from a grad school apartment. It brought to mind the person I got to know then, enriching and ruining my life in equal dose. Yes, the past is quite dead to those who don’t remember it, and how many have I forgotten about or have forgetten about me! But when it lives, whether it’s healthy or not, it can be good company.

One more to go.

 

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Post-it Sextet #2: Sheila Take A Bow

Posted in Music, tagged , , , on June 25, 2020| Leave a Comment »

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From the various seemingly work-related jottings on the back, this seems to be the earliest Post-it, possibly from 2000 or 2001. I’m sure the efficient cause of this Post-it was my workplace, but it can apply to so much more. There’s really not much more to say.

BOOT

The Grime of this World

In the Crotch, Dear…

Louder Than Bombs was always a real album to me, not a compilation, a real treasure trove of Smiths stuff, and an album cover that stands with their best. “Unfocused,” as one reviewer says, but essential.

I’ve been having a Morrissey renaissance. Not owning all of his (often labored) solo stuff, I just collected of a “Golden Hour of The Smiths and Morrissey” for audio consumption, including uncollected Smiths songs and highlights from those Morrissey albums I don’t have.

Strange, it’s The Cure that comes in winter, The Smiths in summer. A few years ago I recommended a bakery barista listen to Strangeways, Here We Come as it started to get really hot out; summer was time for The Smiths I think I told him.

I don’t know if it was that certain mix tapes must have been given to me in the summer, or it’s a memory of tooling around with friends while back from college, but those very tapes still get played in my antient automobile from June to August.

I was going to end this with images from the Johnny Marr show at The Vic from May 2019, but that wouldn’t sit right with you know who. He might prefer to end on these notes, two of his newest, most delightfully nature-y videos, taking the outsider animal’s point of view, of course. Love Is On Its Way Out and Once I Saw A River Clean. There are some dogs in this one too. And what a song!

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& The Top Six Are

Posted in Music, tagged , , , , on June 2, 2020| Leave a Comment »

A quick list of my six favorite * & The * groups, with music released under those names, in chronological order, as prompted by a friend who asked us to stop at five.

Gerry & The Pacemakers

Freddie & The Dreamers

The Mamas & The Papas

Sly & The Family Stone

Echo & The Bunnymen

Prince & The Revolution

 

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Triptych

Posted in Music, My Life's Rich Pageant, Non-Music, tagged , , , , on May 25, 2020| Leave a Comment »

I

As I look at my lists⁠—lists of favorite books, games, favorite movies and shows, movies and shows to see, careers, what to do today, what I want to do with my life in writing, nature studies, and learning the didgeridoo⁠—I sometimes think of what has been lost, how life was long before these lists really took hold and established what seems to be a permanence.

When I was young, I didn’t think about or try to plan which way my mind would go, and accomplished seemingly all sorts of things, including a few fun lists, of course, from the World Almanac, an Estes model rocket catalogue, or whatever else was in my hands; but they were never lists that pressured me into the future. You never know, and more importantly it never seems to matter, which way the mind will go when untutored, unstudied, left to its own devices, un-self-conscious. What projects, pursuits, and pitfalls it will fall into and just as easily slip out of. If there is an inherent energy, a lot will be done, possibly even accomplished.

A couple of writers come to mind who wrote in this way⁠—Lord Byron and H.G. Wells. Byron was an endless fount of poetry for a lot of his life, and was tired by his editors, but kept composing and wasn’t given to too much polishing. Wells pursued his writing objectives, completed them, and then moved on. He did not dwell upon his novels in the aesthetic revision sense. John Keats could sit under a plum tree, scribble up an ode and leave it thrust into some books, to be scooped up by Charles Armitage Brown and later published as a masterpiece.

There is something to working randomly that the burden of age, conscience, time pressures, or simple change has robbed me of. But, contrariwise, there is something to that final polishing and publishing that takes conscientiousness and follow thru. The fine art of acting in the moment and then taking the steps to preserve what is worthwhile out of it.

II

This tidbit came to mind amidst this crisis and all of this almost lecherous turning out of doors and socializing in larger and larger groups: “I am perfectly fine with many things being put on hold. When you’re on crutches you can’t play soccer for a while⁠—do something else. I don’t know why many in our society don’t draw that same conclusion.” My married, but otherwise bordering-on-hermit friend concurred, adding a few choice words about sheep, well here they are: “Maybe I’m full of myself but I think many in our society don’t have the capacity to draw the same conclusion. People work their jobs, watch television. They aren’t critical thinkers. They aren’t learners. They’re sheep. Sitting at home all day, they don’t know what to do with themselves. When you have a narrow identity and that identity is taken away, they don’t see anything other than getting that identity back. I don’t know. It’s a theory.”

III

And then this exercise from an old junior high friend who posted the idea online: favorite songs of yours as a kid, from tenderest babe up to early junior high. I copped out a bit on this, not digging into the deeper reaches of my memory. Maybe I was a little afraid to probe into the pre- and early elementary school daze, but what I came up with was something at least. Just way too many songs passing into my brain in the 70s. I fondly remember playing the song “I Can’t Stand It” from a neighbor’s Donny Osmond album at speed 78, ca. 1977, and I know that wasn’t because we liked the song. 

So, restricting myself to early ’45s I bought that I still have and sometimes play: “Come on Eileen” Dexy’s Midnight Runners, “Rock of Ages” Def Leppard, “Cum on Feel the Noize” Quiet Riot, “Electric Avenue” Eddy Grant, “Abracadabra” Steve Miller Band, “Even the Nights Are Better” Air Supply, “One Thing Leads to Another” The Fixx, “The Safety Dance” Men Without Hats, “Keep Feelin’ Fascination” The Human League, “I Feel for You” Chaka Khan, “Stray Cat Strut” The Stray Cats, “Puttin’ on the Ritz” Taco, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” Bonnie Tyler. Not so bad, actually!

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Prosek Days

Posted in My Life's Rich Pageant, tagged , , , , on May 6, 2020| Leave a Comment »

After a harrowing walk among the fair weather hordes Friday near midday, I stayed in Saturday, and left the apartment by 6 am on Sunday, the time rabbits still nibble on grasses with little wariness and squirrels just begin to scamper.

A warm day already, so it was clear people would be abroad in force, but from 6 to 7, sheer heaven for the solitary walker. Very few people to pass, and very few cars to interfere with walking in the middle of the road anyway. I walked the back and side streets, then up one of the usually busier but now deserted shop streets all with the same bliss.

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Morning light.

The air was warming and the birds were quietly going about their business, apart from a couple of Ring-billed Gulls that stood on the edge of usually crowded street lustily disputing a roll of bread. Chimney Swifts silently soared way above, but wait, those must be their chitters I hear, littering the air. A couple of Mourning Doves shot by, a Starling browsing an alley, House Sparrows up to their usual noise and springtime strutting, Pigeons aflutter, ubiquitous Robins seeking their breakfasts on the bits of grass and mud.

Unknown warblers sang above, requiring much patience and binoculars, the latter of which I certainly did not have. But the feeling of spring pervaded thanks to this and all the green and warmth and anticipation in the early morning air. Undercurrent to it, I kept thinking of Rebels & Redcoats, an old historical board game I used to play.

 

One of many lions stationed outside Chicago homes.

Maybe it was on warm spring like this, I used to go a suburb or two away, to Prosek’s greenhouse and game shop, once I was an older kid and could drive and the shops at the mall Kroch’s and Brentano’s and Hobbytown (or whatever it was called) dried up for board wargames. My mind’s turn to it made me wonder if it was a hint, that that time was the summit of my experience, quietly and excitedly browsing through all of the shrinkwrapped games with their historical enticements and images of maps and tiny square cardboard pieces representing the violent valor of ages past. Despite the mundaneness and evil of war, had there really ever been anything better than the imagination stirred by this intent browsing? I think of a René Magritte painting, Homesickness, when I think of the pride and futility of so much of what humans get up to, and how our better natures turn our backs on such things, but there was still that pull from Rebels & Redcoats and that shop in those early days of my life and that hobby.

I live now in a neighborhood with its own lovely garden center, complete with greenhouse for that luxurious smell of peat and loam or whatever it is, and an appended shop, in this case more a fancy gift shop than wargame and miniatures shop with a war vet guy sitting at the counter wearing a plaid shirt and breathing through tubes attached to an oxygen machine. I remember him telling me he’d game in the evenings, miniature soldiers laid out on lush green tables full of terrain, re-enacting Borodino, Gettysburg, The Bulge—the three battles he said any wargamer worth their salt had simulated.

As I walked down my street home, I found myself singing the chorus of De Sylva, Brown, and Henderson’s “Thank Your Father,” a female Cardinal perused a space of sidewalk, and quite surprising, a pair of Blue Jays with their whistling noise dashed high overhead. I can’t remember seeing Blue Jays around here.

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Corot sky and trees, with that lovely sfumato.

When I got to my side street, where my car resides, another toss of a peanut, and a Crow welcoming and taking. Later that day, peering into the garden next door now and then, and the next morning walking out again, Common Yellowthroat, Hermit Thrush, Chickadee singing loudly, House Wren tittering it up and finally being spied when it flew across the street to another shrub. So many, the various summits of our experience.

 

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Possessed

Posted in Music, My Life's Rich Pageant, tagged , , , , on April 24, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Well, it happened, and it had been such a long time since it had happened.

A couple of weeks ago, our current malaise brought me out into Google street views to walk around old neighborhoods I’d lived in and visited—including Australia, where I once took a fateful trip. Although there was a lot of nostalgia in the air during all of those virtual street visits, the feeling didn’t come to me with full force at that time.

The other day, though, I put on Temple of Low Men by Crowded House, and lay down to stretch, or was I standing to play air guitar? “I could feel you underneath my skin / as the wind rushed in, / sent the kitchen table crashing / she said nobody move.”

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Exploring

But it happened. “I Feel Possessed” came on, its pulsing, quavering opening. And by the time I got to the third song, “Into Temptation,” the feeling had settled in and stayed with me for the whole album. Images from my trip to Oz, with my special welcoming committee of one “crazy Aussie/Indo rep” waiting the other side of the customs gauntlet. I’ve never felt that way before or since; no poems written since the aftermath of that era played itself out.

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It might have been, “You opened up your door / I couldn’t believe my luck / you in your new blue dress / taking away my breath” that really drove it home, zapped me from above and within. “Into your wide open arms  / no way to break this spell.” The warmth I felt then from her, and the warmth I gave her.

Apollo Bay
The woods
Twelve Apostles

Lying back listening, standing up singing along, my mind drifting during the lesser songs that make the excellence of the album even greater sometimes. As it played, there were a bunch of thoughts and feelings, but what predominates is love—it was a pure feeling of love for this person and that time, all happening to me at that moment, and that’s not a bad thing. “Not asking for anything / I just want to be there when it happens again.”

Flora
Federation Square, Melbourne
Fauna (cute koala)

“As I turn to go / you looked at me for half a second.”

More photos here.

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(Musical) Influences

Posted in Music, My Life's Rich Pageant, tagged , , , , , , , on April 18, 2020| 1 Comment »

These days, the mind has time to range every which way in time, and my thoughts recently turned to those who influenced my taste in music. Here are the major ones, all well before I graduated from college.

First must be my dad, who used to strum his acoustic guitar and sing for us from his Sing Out! magazines of folk music. “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” “Reuben James,” “The Wabash Cannonball,” “Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream,” and all of that great stuff. He also spun a lot of Beatles records and turned us on to classical music.

sing out reprints

My elementary school music teacher, Mrs. H, with her wide eyes, also stirred classical imaginings in us. Portraits of the great composers graced the wall she stood in front of while she taught us to play “Hot Cross Buns” on the recorder and xylophone, or guided us on the most atmospheric of experiences, the “Danse Macabre” of Saint-Saëns, which we played out every Halloween.

There were her Christmas/Holiday Programs, where each class took their turn on the risers performing a holiday classic, or something new. We sang “Winter Wonderland,” “Jingle Bell Rock,” complete with top hats and white gloves. And in 5th grade, we sang an original composition that started with, “The little lord Jesus asleep on the hay…”. There were feature songs where my clarinet-ing was even allowed; they conjured up images of winter and Hanukkah. After each class performed their song, they filed over to the holiday tree and placed ornaments we’d made in Mrs. S’s art class. Oh the glitter and the glue!

We had songs in our textbooks too, going back to first and second grades, “I’m gonna put put put on my walking shoes / I’m gonna but but button up my coat / I’m gonna walk right across the land there’s lots of things to see / And if you want to you can walk with me / Walk with me, walk with me, walk with………me!”

Classical also benefitted from the Hooked on Classics record series. I had no idea this guy was the conductor and arranger for ELO’s orchestral elements! Melodies still pop into my head and segue into the melodies they segued into on those records, often having no idea what the pieces are. They’re just stamped on my brain.

Hooked on Classics (from discogs.com)
Hooked on Classics II (from discogs.com)
Hooked on Classics III (from discogs.com)

My mom had her share of influence too, driving us as the did on various errands throughout the day. It was 70s and early 80s radio—Carly Simon, Kool & The Gang, Ambrosia, &c.—that was soundtrack to trips to soccer and tennis lessons, Jewel-Osco, Nichols Library, the Y. Imagine something like this.

We’d stay at my grandparents’ in Ohio, and eventually one got to spinning the records stored indoors or in my grandpa’s workshop attached to the garage. My grandpa might have suggested Louis Armstrong, and he had a few brittle Big Band 78s I still possess, but it was more the records left behind by my aunt and uncles—Chad & Jeremy, Marianne Faithfull, Paul Mauriat, The Kingston Trio that scintillated my ears.

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Beautiful cover from the U.S. release of her first album (from discogs.com)

There was also a great double album Glenn Miller memorial collection, opening the way for Big Band music galore a little down the road.

Somehow or another I got to buying 45s and LP records too, gleaned from radio listening. I remember mowing the lawn with my Walkman headphones on my ears, listening to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 countdown. Early MTV had its place too. 104.3 and its oldies; 94.3 and its even olders. The cassettes I recorded direct from radio with songs like “Sugar Shack” by Jimmy Gilmer and The Fireballs and “Cinnamon” by Derek!

Just as important, my friends BB and DH, who got me into rap in a big way. That first tentative buy of Raising Hell by Run-DMC, the sophomoric sonic boom of License To Ill, scouring record shops for discs by spray-paint-scrawl Techno Hop records and the endless appreciation for record scratching, including trying to imitate it. Cool creations by Mantronix. Public Enemy. Some conventionality arose as well, as someone kept playing Milli Vanilli and such things.

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One of a few great Techno Hop records (from discogs.com)

Later, as high school ended, a new awakening. Alternative music groups too many to even begin naming. Two seminal, immortal “miscellany” tapes from MD, different schools of thought embodied by EJ, RJ, GU, and the rest. My sister’s equally immortal mix tapes, she and her best friend lending me tapes, copying music for me.

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A smattering of tapes from the time

What heady Curefriend days those were! This carried forward into college, accentuated by school breaks and dozens of letters and little packages sent back and forth. And I can’t forget the colorful reference books I inhaled, on British beat groups of the 60s, on alternative rock. I’d just roll the names of the groups and songs over in my head time and again, and sometime was even able to listen to the actual music. A trek to Woodfield Mall to buy (and hear) my first Jam album was one such incident.

What a wonderful time. No wonder my heart and mind still return to it, and all of those that went before.

Oh, and have you voted in the Signac puzzle piece poll yet?

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“If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” Keats

Posted in Music, My Life's Rich Pageant, Non-Music, tagged , on June 18, 2019| 2 Comments »

The time has come again.

I’ve been watching lots of Women’s World Cup soccer action, and figure it is about time. Watching these women play with gusto and expertise hearkens me back to my days playing the same sport, and subsequent efforts in tennis, softball, basketball, and epic pick-up football struggles with friends–but those days for me are no more, even were I to pick sports back up. I have taken a different path, a more bookish one, and I figure I ought to make the most of it rather than look wistfully at other options. So, days of sucking orange slices with comrades in arms may be gone, but we press on.

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Lefties unite! Rose Lavelle left foots it.

A lot of my previous writing was as assigned, always an easy task when given limits, or “because a fire was in my head.” Thanks to these and some other endeavors (see About for a few) I’ve scraped together something of a corpus. As years and un-begun projects stack up, though, it is a good time to start in greater earnest, perhaps with a bit of refinement-through-age helping me, although this is hardly the brevity I was hoping for when I began typing this morning.

This blog is about music, and more. Art exhibits I visit, philosophic and political ideas that rear their heads, favorite works of literature, historical oddities, movies, aesthetic miscellanies, etc. And this all started and starts with The Sugarcubes. A decade or more ago, a workplace intern told me she was a fan of Björk (Guðmundsdóttir), renowned Icelandic solo singer, and presented me with a collection of her best work. When I mentioned Björk’s early group of some distinction, The Sugarcubes, she hadn’t heard of them. Of course, this saddened me.

Now, quite possibly a generation removed from those who have any acquaintance with Björk, let alone The Sugarcubes, I figure one thing I can share for any who are to read is my experience with music, something I have delved into with natural, unthinking avidity for my whole life.

But the idea for this blog starts with The Sugarcubes, specifically their second album, Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week! This album is and was unsung, considered a disappointment at the time among the critics and my friends, my alternative set of friends as opposed to the rap one; another in the catalogue (yes, we can still spell it this way) of supposedly cursed debut follow-ups.

Here_Today,_Tomorrow_Next_Week!

©1989, Elektra Records

I didn’t know the release date, which turns out to be September 1989. What a wonderful date! My birthday month and the start of my college career! I was off in a place away from my altie music friends, but saw them plenty during Christmas break and summers, and we even exchanged written and posted letters often discussing these very things, music releases that is! So, with those days in mind, I will see what I can make of this blog today, tomorrow, next week.

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