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So, field hockey. Source of so many informative lessons: How to be a team player. How to remain upbeat in the face of eternal defeat. How to apologize to your friend after you break her front tooth with your stick. How to get a guy with a teddy … this last bit I absorbed, wide-eared, as a freshman listening to a few seniors gab.
Oh, and music. Not only did my field hockey years involve constant exposure to Pink Floyd, they also provided my introduction to Steve Miller. Or at least, my first awareness of him by name.
It was a passing moment with another upperclassman — this one more interested in tunes than teddies — who happened to mention the Steve Miller Band. “Uh, the what?” asked little MK. She stared at me, shocked. “You know: ‘Really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree.’”
I did not know. Though how I had escaped this ubiquitous song for those fourteen years is a mystery even now. Once I was aware of it, of course, I heard it all the time. And despite its distinct whiff of Cheez, I cannot help but love the whistling and the Maurice and the guitar solos. I am a sucker.
This morning I heard a live version, with a sort of reggaed-up beat and looser vocals. Normally I’d pass right by, but I allowed myself to pretend it was a whole new song. And I drove home feeling … pompatus.
Bonus question: Should I see this movie, “The Pompatus of Love”?
Stated: “Romeo and Juliet” is one of the rare cases of a remake (Indigo Girls) surpassing the original (Dire Straits).
Talk amongst yourselves.
Personally, I flip-flop between the two versions. I can’t help wanting to favor the original, on principal, and I do like what Mark Knopfler does with the song, both with his wry voice and with his delicate guitar. But then, you know how I love the tear-your-heart-out-along-with-your-vocal-cords music, and Amy Ray absolutely, gloriously destroys herself on the Indigo Girls’ take.
Right now, having stumbled upon the latter during my long weekend away, I’m favoring its more passionate, wrenching flavor. But I’m unwilling to pledge eternal allegiance.
I think I discovered this song in college, but I can’t recall which version I heard first. I remember thinking it was wonderfully unique and romantic. Nowadays, it’s a song I don’t hear often, and don’t think much about, but I am always happy when it appears on my radio.
This morning I stumbled upon a bouncy, up-tempo version of “Ol’ Man River.” It featured a Hammond organ! And a saxophone! And a sort of swingin’ interpretation of the lyrics, e.g.: “You and me, we! Sweat-n-sweat-n-sweat and strain!”
What. The. Hell.
This has to be one of the most moving songs ever written. Yes, it’s hackneyed in places, and yes, it treads not so lightly in uncomfortable racism territory. The original 1920s-era lyrics, in fact, blithely began, “Niggers all work on de Mississippi.” Later versions changed the term to “darkies,” then “colored folks.” Eventually, the standard became the more generic but somehow missing the mark “here we all work on the Mississippi.”
Missing the mark especially when performed by white fellas. Yeah, I’m talking to you, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Tony Bennett. It seems particularly audacious to sing about your aching, bale-toting body when you’re a white male crooner in a tux.
This morning’s version turned out to be by Earl Grant. Not white. But that doesn’t make his perky swing version any better in my book. This song is melancholy, plodding, painful, and then soaring — it’s written that way for a reason. To perk it up is to pay it no mind.
Full disclosure: I sometimes sing this as a lullaby for Junior. Aware that I’m a white woman in the 21st Century, and that I’m singing to my toddler about slavery and pain and death and the fundamental inconsequential nature of human life in an effort to relax him into sleep, I feel a tinge of inappropriateness. But I can’t shake the beauty of the song. Ech, maybe that’s how Bing felt too.
I’m sure someone, or several someones, have written the history of women in rock. In my simple head, it goes like this: commodification of girl groups in the 50s and early 60s; cool, independent women in the late 60s and 70s; back to commodification in the 80s (hel-LO, cone bra!).
I know it’s not that simple. But it does sort of amaze me that people like Janis Joplin and Patti Smith and Chrissie Hynde rose to prominence so soon after the era of male-puppeteered groups like The Chiffons and The Shirelles. Then again, a few other things happened rapidly in those years as well. I think my head would have exploded at some point, had I been witness to it all.
Anyhow, Chrissie Hynde rocks. Is the point of today’s post. I love her voice, I love her songs, I love that in my mental file cabinet she and Tom Petty are the same person (is it the hair?), I love that “My City Was Gone” is a condemnation of sprawl that came way before most people were even beginning to think rabid development might be a bad thing. Truth be told, I don’t know much about her real life, but I can tell that Chrissie doesn’t take any shit from anyone.
* On a side note, she mentions Cuyahoga and pronounces it “ca-ho-ga.” As opposed to Michael Stipe, who pronounced it “ki-ya-ho-ga” in REM’s song about the river. Their song was my introduction to the place name, and it’s also good for belting out, so that’s how I’ve always said it. But apparently there’s a perpetual argument about the pronunciation — with a third alternative, ki-ya-HOG-a, preferred by many. Who knew.
** On another side note, I just caught on to the fact that Rush Limbaugh used part of this song without permission as his theme for years, Chrissie eventually took him to task, and now she donates the royalties to PETA.
As a child, I was lucky enough to take several trips to the West Coast, because both of my brothers were (and still are) living there. At one point, one was at CalTech and the other was studying law at Stanford, so my parents and I had a few memorable trips between LA and San Francisco. These were formative years and formative journeys; I marveled at the sunny, roller-skating lifestyle of LA and the foggy, bridgy drama of San Fran. Stereotypes, yes. But all true!
At some point, driving into San Francisco with my brother (the LA brother, so that’s perplexing), he pointed to the houses on the hillside and started singing “Little Boxes.” He gave Pete Seeger full credit for the song, and until this morning I thought clever Pete wrote it. But it turns out his version was a remake.
You will never, ever hear the original or the remake on the radio in this day and age. But you will hear Johnny Cougar singing “Pink Houses.”And in your brain, if you are me, you will connect the two.
They are very different songs, but both offer an indictment of the American class system. And both talk about pink houses! A little girl’s dream.*
*Big lie. I never liked pink. Purple, now that’s another story.
I have a long history with heartbreak — indulgent, weepy, drama-queenly heartbreak — that began when I was 10.
WHAT?!?!, you exclaim increduously. WHEN YOU WERE 10?!?! C’est pas possible! You were but an enfant! What did you know of the breaking of the heart, of l’amour?
O but it is true, my Frenchy friend. I had a boyfriend — okay, go ahead, put massive ironic quotes around that word — and he was dreamy and it was TRUE LOVE. And then he broke up with me, broke my heart, and went out with my best friend.
OH! THE PAIN! THE BETRAYAL OF THE CUTE LITTLE BLOND BOY! I FEEL IT STILL. (Not really. The cute little blond boy stayed blond and cute and a buddy through the years MK and I were living together in Portland and going to hear him play with various bands in various bars around town.)
But OH! OH did I wallow in the luxurious devastation of a fifth-grade dumping, and OH how my soundtrack was a popular song of the day, Survivor’s “The Search Is Over.”
I knew the pain of that song, man. I felt it in my bones. After all, I was a pre-teen who had been dumped by a cute little blond boy — how could I not?
Anyway, so, yeah, “The Search Is Over” was the first song I played over and over to indulge a broken heart, and it would certainly not be the last. Funnily, it’s one of those classic (insert ironic quotes again) songs that you (I) don’t hear so often on the radio. And I had certainly never, until looking it up this morning, seen the video. It is nothing short of ridonkulous — if you need some good 80s nonsense to brighten your day, check this out:
That thing makes about as much sense as deciding your heart has been broken at the age of 10.
Tragically, I did not actually hear this Poison gem this morning. What I heard was the AC/DC classic “You Shook Me All Night Long.” But it sent me spiraling back to seventh grade nonetheless, to a series of skits our English class put on about The Perils Of Consuming Alcohol.
It makes my skin crawl just thinking about this event. There’s so much adolescent angst and embarrassment and awkwardness tied up in it still.
To wit: One of the skits was a party scene, with that Poison song blasting in the background, and us extras forced to rock out while two primary players had some earnest discussion about TPOCA.
To witter: In my starring scene, I played a drunk girl who insisted on driving home. I was paired with an equally uncool boy who played a cool boy who wanted to take my keys.
Needless to say, I had never been drunk in my life. (Well, save the time I was three years old and ate grasshopper pie and proclaimed to my whole family that I was drunk, a rollicking tale that got rehashed a lot in my youth.) The only possible way to heighten my paralyzing fear of public performance would have to have been pairing it with a thespian challenge such as this.
My signature move in this skit, I recall with devastating preciseness, was bending forward, flipping my hair in a sort of feathering motion as I stood back up — entertaining, since it would already have been plastered into an attempt at feathering by Aqua Net — and laughing with what I hoped was some semblance of drunkenness.
Now, my grown-up self knows that it’s OK that, at 12, I was not getting wasted every weekend. My grown-up self, in fact, wondered for the very first time this morning why our teacher felt like the best form of education about TPOCA was having a group of 12- and 13-year-olds act drunk. Shouldn’t she have brought in an educational troupe or something? Perhaps a slideshow would have done the trick?
A slideshow I could have expunged from my brain. But this — this will never go away.
