Author: lgmwriting

The Association

The songs from this group come very close to my heart and soul. On their greatest hits CD all of them are there. Sometimes I look at the CD and think I want to listen to it but I carefully lay it aside. I have to be in a certain mood.

I just adore Along Comes Mary. I think it’s one of the wildest, best, drug-inspired song ever. The words drive me crazy with joy. The fact that I never “understood” all the words only made it more mysterious and exotic. I used to listen to it with my friend Iris. She loved it too.

Also, Windy. My husband hates this song and thinks it’s a song about a maniac girl who runs up and down streets giving out rainbows. However, I remember a sunny, late afternoon day in June when school was over. Me, a friend, and my boyfriend were speeding along the highway to the Pittsburgh airport to say goodbye to another friend who was going away from the summer. Windy was blaring out from the radio. I felt smug. I had a whole summer to be with my boyfriend.

Also, Never My Love. Such a tender ballad, a boy reassuring his girlfriend that he will never get tired of her, never leave her.

The Mamas and the Papas

For some odd reason I decided to combine The Association and The Mamas and the Papas. Even my father liked their close, tight, perfect harmonies. They had sweet voices and didn’t just record Papa John’s music. They re-recorded some songs from several years before which I thought was nice. Do You Wanna Dance is one of my favorites, also There Is A Rose In Spanish Harlem. Mama Cass made me nervous sometimes. She was so huge but seemed not to be ashamed of it. And when she opened her mouth and sang, it was beautiful. I was so influenced by the Mamas and Papas that I incorporated them into one of my own stories. As for truly excellent song-writing, listen to Creeque Alley.

John and Michy were getting kind of itchy
Just to leave the folk music behind
Zol and Denny, lookin’ for a penny
Trying to get a fish on the line…

I went through a short period where I just played this music over and over, everywhere I went. Michael once told me that he understood why the sixties and seventies music is considered classic. Ain’t nothing like it.

I wrote about early times with The Beatles but that’s just a small piece of their musical history. There are volumes of books about their musical history. So I can just try.

In the mid-sixties they started to have a new sound. It certainly was something I’d never heard before. There were still songs about love but some of the music on Rubber Soul had, sometimes, a melancholy sadness. Also, the imagery was new. We were on the brink of a major historical shift. Rubber Soul was different.

All of the soul-sounding groups from Motown sang about love and loss and finding love again. None had the slightest whisper of drug-related lyrics. I researched this and I think I’m right. Motown was glamorous clothes, tight and exciting body movements done perfectly in sync, the right hair styles, and “Standing in The Shadow of Love,” “I Second That Emotion,” and “Stop in the Name of Love.”

When Sergeant Pepper came out in 1967 we all went a little crazy. Harold remembers something about driving to my house to play the album, then on to somebody else’s; who could remember historical dates of wars and names of kings when all of this was going on in the real world? Even the album cover was a kind of shock to the system, with all those costumes and stuff. And the lyrics…what did they mean? What were they singing about? Nobody knew for sure. With Motown you knew exactly what they were saying when they sang.

“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” John Lennon kept to his word when he said that this was not a song about LSD but a drawing his four year old son Julian made.

“For the Benefit of Mr. Kite.” People thought for sure this was about drugs. High as a kite, right?? No, it was based on a poster one of them saw, advertising a fair.

Weird, unheard-of sounds and songs composed in a minor key–I can only speak for myself when I say that this music was getting into my head and changing me.

I was thinking about The Band. I had never heard of them until I met Mark. He showed me their album called “Music from Big Pink” and told me that they had been Bob Dylan’s back up band.

That first album and subsequent ones could make up a musical background for our years together. Listening to music with my first husband could be a lot of fun, then go too far and become both boring and confusing. Come to think of it, listening to Cream was the same way. Again, I had never heard of any of the three of them. Their lyrics made no sense and Ginger Baker was almost as scary as Janis Joplin.

“Up On Cripple Creek” was a nice Band song; so was “Stage Fright.”

I pulled into Nazareth, I was feeling about half past dead
I looked around to find a place where I could lay my head
Hey mister, could you tell me where a man might find a bed.
He looked at me, shook his head, no was all he said.

Take a load off Fanny
Take a load for free
Take a load off Fanny
And you put the load/put the load right on me.

Could make no sense out of these lyrics but I don’t think I was in the mood for things to make sense. Cut loose from family pressure I spent a lot of time, as I said, laying on Mark’s couch and listening to him interpret this stuff.

Life could have been a lot worse. It had been worse and it was time for me to have some fun. What the music makes me remember most is how responsible we “rebels” were. No drinking, no drugs. Earning good grades and having jobs. Plus, when I got myself some birth control pills, and the doctor said I had to take them through a whole menstrual cycle and abstain, we did as we were told. I wasn’t taking any chances where that was concerned. So much for “living in sin.”

I had a double CD of Stevie Wonder’s greatest hits but I think I lost it someplace. Maybe I’ll replace it because it was mind-blowing. The title of this CD was Stevie Wonder’s Musiquarium and it had pictures of fish on the cover.

When Michael was a teenager we listened to music together, especially while I was driving him from place to place. His mind was like a sponge, it took in everything. Michael liked the merging of the words “music” and “aquarium.” He thought it was clever and appealing. This CD had “I Was Made To Love Her”, “For Once In My Life”, “Front Lines”, “Signed, Sealed, and Delivered”, and Michael’s and my favorite–“Higher Ground” from the album “Innervisions.”

This song gave us something to think about. Michael pointed out that the song wasn’t about love and relationships between men and women. It was Stevie Wonder’s instruction to all people, not just his own race–dreamers, don’t stop dreaming.

Speaking of music and cars and driving, when Michael was a baby, we would drive along the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Pittsburgh. We would leave at 6 PM when Michael would usually fall asleep in his car seat, making the trip a kind of nicely surreal travel experience. On these trips we listened to Gordon Lightfoot’s “Gord’s Gold.” Peter liked folk-type music so we eventually learned all the words to all the songs and sang as we crossed the state. Michael was always a great traveler. He never got restless, just sat there if he wasn’t asleep, and watched Pennsylvania flying by.

Natural Women

It should be no surprise to anybody that the rock and roll era was dominated by men. I don’t relate to the traditional meaning of “feminist” so I’m not angry about this; however, I was paging through the thousands of websites devoted to the music from my growing-up times and decided to write about some women rock and roll singers I like/love.

Who can not love Aretha? You can’t just “like” her. She cuts across every social stratus–black/white, male/female, young/old, professional musician/just a fan. And there’s been so many words written about Aretha where writers try to put into words what this woman possesses. I decided, while putting together this blog entry, to say that the brain doesn’t have any importance in this. When Aretha sings it goes straight from your ears to your heart and soul. When I was young, listening to her singing “Respect;” I didn’t know for years what she was talking about when she sang “…give me my propers when I get home.” What were propers? I finally figured it out. Also, a song I already wrote about–Son of a Preacher Man–was originally meant for Aretha. Dusty Springfield recorded it instead because Aretha was linked to church music and it did not fit her image. I actually remember–and this was years and years ago–reading that Dusty Springfield, after a recording session, stepped into an elevator and ran straight into Aretha. All the First Lady of Soul said was: “You go, girrrl.” Now that’s class. Her songs are pure heartache and longing–“I Never Loved A Man The Way That I Love You.” There is also anger–“Think”–where she gets mad at a long time love for having not treated her nicely. She’s the very best. And I still haven’t said what I really love about her. Oh well…

Janis Joplin used to scare me. In a way she still does. Everything about her is open; eyes/mouth/legs. She’s hungry and lonely and will do anything to find fulfillment. So I don’t know if I like her, love her, or I’m too scared to listen to her raspy voice, begging a man to “…take another little piece of (her) heart.” Go around and ask women you know if they ever felt that way…that they want to give yet another piece of themselves to a man. And are willing to scream it, like Janis. If these women you know are honest, they will agree; love makes you do ridiculous, shameful things. Janis died at 27 from a heroin overdose. Let’s hope she rests in peace.

Carole King is worlds away from Janis and Aretha; through years of hard work, long hours, a young husband, and childcare worries while composing first rate music for other people to sing, she built an authentic life. I think you can see this in her face. Something clean and classy along with hard won dignity. Someone, I can’t remember who, persuaded her to record her own music so she recorded Natural Woman after Aretha did. That took guts, don’t you think? I can recall, again, a while ago, reading an article about Carole and she said that during the very late fifties and early sixties–the “Brill Building” years–she got to hang out with Black singers and musicians for the first time. She was from a different world. Listening to these girls and women talking about their love lives and experiences got her a major injection of soul. You can hear it in a lot of her songs. “I Feel The Earth Move” is one of my favorites, but there are so many.

Finally, I want to mention Gladys Knight. She didn’t sing alone but there’s no doubt that her voice is the important one. I will never, ever get tired of her singing “Midnight Train To Georgia.” It made me feel as if I was on that soul train, having gotten rid of all my possessions, hoping for a new start.

Many couples have a “song” that was popular when they were falling in love. I have three of them and I want to write fully about them without feeling silly. Love is never silly.

When I was first in love at age 16-17 the year was 1967. The mid sixties had some of the best music ever; there were tons of talented composers, artists, and singers on the radio every single day. There is nothing like first love. I’ve never been able to capture in words what it was like. Parents don’t want you to fall in love at that time in your life–but I was so happy then, so contented, that nothing went wrong; my grades went up and I was singing in the school choir. The song that was “ours” was Happy Together by The Turtles.

Imagine me and you, I do
I think about you day and night, it’s only right
To think about the girl you love
And hold her tight
So happy together.

If I should call you up, invest a dime
And you say you belong to me, and ease my mind
Imagine how the world could be, so very fine
So happy together.

Having reviewed this time in my life, I think this all came upon me too early and I couldn’t handle it and it exploded in my face.

When I met Mark Hoffman I was 19 and he was 20. There was never a time when I needed a friend/comrade/lover more and he was all those things. My father had died; I was fighting with my family; I hadn’t gotten over the traumatic ending of my first love; I felt ugly and worthless. Then here’s this boy who came from a different place, read poetry and liked to talk and take long walks, listen to music while holding me in his arms as we lay on the couch in his student apartment. It really was quite beautiful and I’ll never forget what we had. The song that was popular just then was Bob Dylan’s Lay Lady Lay.

Lay lady lay, lay across my big brass bed
Stay lady stay, while the night is still ahead…
Why wait any longer for the world to begin
You can have your cake and eat it too.
Why wait any longer for the one you love
When he’s standing, in front of you…

The words were perfect and fit my situation exactly. I felt I had been waiting for years to find somebody who really loved me, somebody who would liberate me, somebody
who would never leave me and build a world with me. Mark made me feel beautiful and
and sexy and most important–worthy of esteem. Mark liked strong women and always cared about what I thought. Our talks were endless. Also, my strong libido got in the way of rational thought; my sexual experience before Mark had awakened me and I
wanted a lover. I found that in Mark along with all his other attributes. We were meant, it turned out, to stay in that place; marriage unfortunately did not suit us. After we split up we tried a reconciliation but it only lasted three months.

Peter and I have many songs. After 40 years it makes sense. In the early years we liked listening to Danny’s Song by Kenny Loggins. There are, in the lyrics, lines like “People smile and tell me I’m the lucky one…we’ve just begun…think I’m gonna have a son. He will be like she and me, free as a dove, conceived in love,
sun is gonna shine above.” Peter had a lot on his plate to handle. Burned–kicked aside hard–my heart pulverized by age 18, my father dying, then Mark and the divorce…talk about baggage. However, Peter was carrying baggage himself. So we threw together what we had and made a life; it’s not a life based on taking the easy way. It’s a hand-built, authentic existence; a lot of healing happened on both sides. Our absolute favorite song:

Oh we ain’t got a barrel of money
Maybe we’re ragged and funny
But we travel along, singing our song
Side by side.

Oh we don’t know what’s coming tomorrow
Maybe it’s trouble and sorrow
But we travel the road, sharing the load
Side by side.

When they’ve all had their troubles and parted
We’ll be the same as we started
Just traveling along, singing our song.
Side by side.

The line: When they’ve all had their troubles and parted, we’ll be the same as we started. Because over the years we’ve been friends with so many couples who have
split up and gone apart–used to make me sad.

Leslie’s Compilation

My husband likes doing nice things for me. He made a CD of some of my favorite music for me to listen to as I drive.

Among my mother’s records was the music from Threepenny Opera. As I said, I didn’t connect with the story or the music. That’s mostly true. But there’s a character in that play and movie called Mack the Knife.

There’s a song about Mack the Knife on the record, but it was sung in a quiet, plaintive way. Not jazzed up, with any kind of a beat. Then, in 1959, Bobby Darin recorded this same song but in a totally different way. It was pure jazz and he pulled it off perfectly. I still like listening to it. It’s an odd song about some kind of unpleasant character. That’s as far as I ever got with it. It’s on my CD.

Also, who doesn’t like the beginning music to the original Hawaii-50? The drum beat goes straight into your nervous system the way good music does. Listening to that while watching these huge waves cresting always made me jumpy and giggly. I loved that show, even with Jack Lord and his very weird hair style. Could it instead be called a non-hair style? It’s on the CD also.

Finally, file these two under the title of “Corny.” Yes, I have a wide-ranging interest in music including classical but also themes from movies that have romantic and sexy endings.

To Sir With Love: I adored this movie with noble Sidney Poitier in the lead role as a teacher of a bunch of hoodlum students in a London slum. I like any movie about teachers. The theme to the movie was great.

A Summer Place: A lovely girly movie with strange interrelationships between two pairs of parents and their adolescent children, who fall in love. A satisfying ending. I found out that this movie was taken from a book by the author Sloan Wilson. The movie theme was performed by Percy Faith.

I can’t go on with this listing of songs I like unless I include The Platters. Time-wise, they are more from the very late 50s and early 60s. When they were at their peak I still wasn’t quite a teenager; but I grew to like them as an adult, which is odd.

Great Pretender is one of their best known songs; also Smoke Gets In Your Eyes. But there’s a song on their greatest hits album called My Prayer.

The group was made up of four guys and a young woman. One of the guys was Tony Williams. He had the lead voice and what a voice; he easily moved up and down the scales and did not sing falsetto. You can hear his spectacular voice in most of the songs but he shines in My Prayer. My lady friends in the medical transcription room always called me in if they played that song on the oldies station.

Also, before I move on to the super-groups I have to include The Drifters. So many songs to love–On Broadway, On The Boardwalk, Save The Last Dance For Me. They also recorded Up On The Roof and yes, there’s a story connected with this.

During the years I was working together with Peter we had a workshop that was on the top floor of an old manufacturing company. There was a door, you stepped out, and you could see miles and miles of houses, buildings, and roads. You had to be careful because there was no protection along the sides of the roof. Nothing to keep you from falling. We used to sit out there on nice days and eat our lunches. In lots of ways it was the best years we had…Michael safely taken care of, steady money coming in from the birds.

Finally–and this is weird and can’t be explained–I need to include Bob Dylan. Why am I sticking him at the tail end of this piece on Music I Love? I don’t know. My feelings about Bob Dylan have always been mixed. Sometimes I’ve not liked him because his lyrics don’t make sense and gave me a chill. In many pictures he’s not smiling. Somehow–I think this comes from Joan Baez’s autobiography–I’ve read that he used her and hurt her considerably. Just listen to her song called “Diamonds and Rust.” Girly stuff. But now that I got through that, I have to say that some of his songs really are a part of me. Mainly, this came to me through knowing Mark. Mark had a poetic side and loved all of Dylan’s music. He could sit and talk about the meanings of the words for hours.

Nashville Skyline is my favorite album of Dylan’s. For one thing, he’s smiling in the picture on the album. The songs appeal to me a lot…they are really beautiful. Also hearing Johnny Cash sing with him was great. But my almost favorite album is Blood on the Tracks. The lyrics are perfect and have all different kinds of effects on me. I like to sing with this album as I drive. Also, when Michael was young, we listened to it a lot and Michael really liked it too. He liked “The Jack of Hearts.” I liked “Shelter From the Storm.” But all of the other songs are very, very good. Mark liked to sing “I Threw It All Away,” which I think was on Nashville Skyline. There is a stanza that begins: “I once held mountains, in the palms of my hands…” Mark was made to feel very sexy, listening to that. He was convinced that the mountains in the song were a woman’s breasts.

1.People get ready, there’s a train a comin’
You don’t need no baggage, you just get on board.
All you need is faith, to hear the diesels hummin’
Don’t need no ticket, you just thank the Lord.

This is the first stanza to People Get Ready, first recorded by
Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions.

I can’t write about this song without becoming very emotional indeed. Anybody who knows me knows that MLK, Jr. is among my heroes and for some reason I vibrate with soul music like this.

A beautiful soul singing beautiful soul.

Wouldn’t it be nice to think that after all the struggle and strife, a train is coming? And you don’t need a ticket, passport, picture ID, baggage? All you need is faith. Who has that?

2.So people get ready, for the train to Jordan
Picking up passengers coast to coast.
Faith is the key, open the doors and board ’em
There’s hope for all, among those loved the most.

This is at the very heart of music. I might be the only person on the face of this earth to say this, but it’s the same with classical music. Just listen to Beethoven’s Ode To Joy, the final piece of the 9th symphony. It’s just German soul music!!!

3.There ain’t no room for the hopeless sinner
Whom would hurt all mankind, just to save his own–believe me now
Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner
For there is no hiding place against the kingdom’s throne.

So you can get on this train even if you’re a sinner. The only sinner who can’t get on is the hopeless one.

4.So people get ready, there’s a train a comin’
You don’t need no baggage, you just get on board.
All you need is faith, to hear the diesels hummin’
Don’t need no ticket, you just thank the Lord.

After the arrival of the Beatles we were “invaded” by the British. It was an onslaught of talented writers and singers–it was overwhelming.

I liked a lot of these guys. Gerry and The Pacemakers was one of my favorite groups in the mid-sixties. Favorite song of theirs? Ferry Cross the Mersey. I think it’s a beautiful song and one of the reasons I liked it was that it wasn’t about love between and boy and girl. It’s about a different kind of love; it was about loving the place where you grew up.

Now I’m forced to say something about the Rolling Stones. I do not want to irritate anybody. But the Stones had little effect on me. Their music was kind of metallic, it was angry, sounded anti-social. Mick sang as if he wasn’t nice to girls. I know this sounds a little strange but music comes from the heart. I remember one of their first hits–“Let’s Spend The Night Together.” I also remember liking “Paint It Black.” This boy had lost the girl he loved and his “whole world was black.” Of course I could sympathize with this. But as they moved on and kept putting out songs I didn’t pay much attention to them. Yes, there is a story connected with this.

When I was working as a medical transcriber the other women in the room found out that I hated “Brown Sugar” and “Under My Thumb.” My desk was separated from their room; any time either song came on the oldies radio station they’d find a way to get me to come in there. It worked every time.

Also memorable is the Spencer Davis Group and their song “Gimme Some Lovin'” I remember riding around in my friend Iris’ car with that booming from the radio; and I was always a Steve Winwood fan.

I think that we had the very best music and this music gave us an identity. We were separated, very much so, from our parents’ world. And rock and roll is full of sex. During my research for writing this blog I came upon an interesting fact: “rock and roll” derived its name from black slang meaning sex.