(W)Ringing Out the Years' Memories

Album: The Connells, Ring, 1993

Acquired: My sister Clair sent this tape to me as a gift in 1994. It just arrived in the mail one day, not for a birthday or anything. That was cool, and it wasn't the last time she would be so thoughtful. I don't give gifts spontaneously. If you want me to start doing so, prepare to be disappointed.

I'm plenty generous, and I definitely know exactly what is good for you to get. What I am not is a shopper or someone who "was just thinking of you." No offense. I just tend to think about nothing except when I absolutely have to.

Best Track: " '74-'75"

Lasting Memory: This album doesn't evoke memories for me. Rather, it plunges me into sad reverie. Watch the video for " '74-'75" linked below, and you'll understand what I mean.

Also check these lyrics from that tune:

Got no reason for coming to me and the rain running down
There's no reason
And the same voice coming to me like it's all slowing down
And believe me

I was the one who let you know I was your sorry-ever-after
'74-'75
Give any more and I'll defy
'Cause you're really only after '74-'75

If sound had a color, this whole album would be sepia fading to grey. There are the recollections good times when you were "Slackjawed" to realize that the girl of your dreams also liked you enough to stick around. There are the where-did-that-come-from flashes of regret for having "Disappointed" that woman. Then there are the ultimately futile attempts to get back to the better days by becoming a "New Boy":

Sometimes I get the feeling things won't fall apart
Sometimes I think it's gone too far
Sometimes I get the feeling things seem pretty nice
Then again sometimes, I'd like to leave you twice

Once we decide upon it
We won't fall apart
This time I think it's gone too far
And you get where you can't decide
Don't ask any other
And you get where you can't decide

Didn't I say "sorry"?
Didn't I say "dear"?
Didn't I consider
Didn't I stand clear
Didn't you say, "New boy, get down on your knees."
Didn't I say, "Trying, I'm trying, I'm trying."

But, in the end, there will always be the unanswered questions about why she left anyway, a la "Running Mary":

I was running Mary
And the days were growing long
And I was minding mine
I was doing nothing wrong

And the news you sent me
And the bar's upon the door
And this one caught me blind
Couldn't stop me anymore

Tell me how much do I forgive
'Cause you laid one in on me
But I'm all right
Tell me how much ... this goes on and on

I was running barely
And it's hard to face me more
And I was minding mine
And doing nothing more

It's about to start raining here in Virginia Beach, and temps will soon be plummeting from around 70 to the mid-30s. A new year is about to start, which seems more like 365 days to create new bittersweet memories than anything else. I think I'll listen to Ring again.

Watch the " '74-'75" video

Up Next: Robert Cray, Strong Persuader, 1986

P.S. The above heartache was laid bare for entertainment purposes only. Who am I? This guy?

A Quick Word Never Is

Album: The Connells, One Simple Word, 1990

Acquired: I probably received this as a birthday or Christmas present. Thanks to the gifter, or thanks to me if I bought it myself.

Best Track: "Too Gone"

Lasting Memory: I listened to this album a lot while I was researching and writing papers for classes during my two-year junior year at Virginia Tech. It has a nice mellow tone, and the lyrics to most of the songs are mixed low, making them easy to tune out.

If a listener does tune out the lyrics to the songs on One Simple Word, he or she will be proving the points the album seems to have been created to make. Those points are that communication is difficult, meanings are often missed intentionally, and, despite these realities, we all need to try to get and keep each other's attention. Failing to make the effort dooms us to a fate worse than loneliness. It causes loss of the very self-identity that allows us to relate to other people.

My favorite track from this album, "Too Gone," presents evidence in support of each of these points:

And what am I too gone for you?
And when am I too gone?
And what am I too gone for you?
And when am I too gone?

Wasn't I once the one for you?
And what am I to say?
Wasn't I once the one for you?
And what am I to say?

One if by land, two if by sea, three if by chance
Four for the door, five for the sky, six in my hands

[Chorus, quoting musically and lyrically from Shannon's "Let the Music Play"]
Let the music play
We don't get away
There goes the music baby
We know how to use it
Let it play

Let the music play
We don't get away
There goes the music baby
We know how to use it
Let it play

One if by land, two if by sea, three if by chance
Four for the door, five for the sky, six in my pants

Things don't have to get so bad, especially when the solution is as simple as acquiescing to the request "speak to Me," which song begins

Slow down
I'm not looking for an answer
At least not today
Instead, entertain me for the moment
This won't go away

[Chorus]
You speak to me, then sentence me
You change me around
Turn me over and around you like that
Then just let me be.

So while what we hear might not always be welcome, it is surely necessary. Because when it "All Sinks In,"

Then I recognize the classic signs
Of this unkind disease
Be advised
Please realize

And it all sinks in on us sometimes
Oh, and it all sinks down around us.

When the painful truths do register, you can get "The Joke" and figure out "What Do You Want?".

I wrote a few posts ago that The Connells wrote songs that didn't really mean much. I stand by that statement as it pertains to the bands first two albums. The Connells' third and fourth albums, however, have a lot of lyrical depth and stand as, really, conceptual pieces.

To revisit yesterday's question of whether The Connells went "dark" as they matured, I'll have to say no. What The Connells did was progress from "playing rock 'n' roll is fun" to "having fun can have unwelcome personal consequences" to "as long as you establish and keep open lines of communication, then you don't have to mired in rue."* In other words, like The Call, the Connells grew up and recorded their experiences in music and verse. Or to quote The Connells back at themselves, "He was a bad dancer/ 'Til he learned to shimmy."

Listen to a clip from "Too Gone"

Up Next: The Connells, Ring, 1993

* Mired in Roux would be a great band name and/or recipe.

Once You Believed You Had Something to Say

Album: The Connells, Fun & Games, 1989

Acquired: I bought this at either the Record Exchange or Books, Strings 'n' Things in Blacksburg during the early spring of 1989. I may even have purchased The Connells' Darker Days at the same time. That would be cool because the albums could not possibly be more different in tone.

Best Track: "Motel"

Lasting Memory: In late April 1990, my friend and erstwhile dormmate Barry and I spent a frustrating Saturday trying to see The Connells play in and around Blacksburg. The band was rumored to be playing a surprise set at a block party called Bargerfest before they played a scheduled show at the annual Phi Kappa Alpha spring kegger. The mostly dirt-paved alley where the block party was being held was too crowded for us to get in at first and empty of beer, bands, and non-Barger residents by the time we returned. The fraternity kegger was a Greeks-only affair, and neither Barry nor I were in a frat. We consoled ourselves with a case of Milwaukee's Best and my Connells cassettes back at his apartment.

Associating this not-really-all-that-sad-in-retrospect story with Fun & Games is very appropriate because the album is all about thinking you're a loser and going out of your way to find evidence of your loserness.

The chorus and final verse of Fun & Games' lead track, "Something to Say," run

[Chorus]
So you're left with your thoughts and where do you go
Out the window or an open door
And once you believed they could keep you awake
It's so deceiving
So you talk to yourself and what do you know
You answer back with a "Don't say so"
And once you believed you had something to say
It's so deceiving

So, you never learned the way to hold a crowd
And it turns out now that you were dying
To be everything
To everyone and for all time
Ah, the golden boy
Did you stop trying?

"Sal" tells the same tale as Smokey Robinson's "Tears of a Clown" (as recently interpreted by a reunited General Public), albeit with fewer operatic allusions and tons more boozing :

She left you but you still love her
You thought she was the easy part
She smelled a lie and the luck of the winner
Left you standing in the dark

[Chorus]
You can cry like a loser, like a clown
But it doesn't seem to help at all
Oh, you and I aren't used to what we've found
Love like rain will fall

For a day or two you're feeling dizzy
For a day there's no alcohol
But tonight you're dancing the song of the sinner
Tonight you'll seem to have it all

Another track on Fun & Games, "Uninspired," explains how musical and lyrical acts of creation and performance are sometimes worse than keeping one's thoughts and emotions bottled up. What is an artist supposed to do besides despair when "The words that he screams/ Sift through the smoke and sweat/ While his wandering mind/ Tries to tell .../ To tell him he's uninspired/ In some weary, absent way/ To tell him he's simply tired"?

The artist might just hit the road, literally and spiritually, to find a home and some real meaning. That can be a sucker's bet, The Connells explain in "Motel"

There isn't room in the inn
The keeper wouldn't be my friend
I could tell in his eye
He'd never change his mind

So, I'm left to
walk in the cold
The light of day is growing old
But who's to blame
Neither rain nor shine

[Chorus]
That's why this is the best of me
Giving up
This is the rest of me
And I've had quite enough
This is the best of me
Giving up
You've seen enough of me
To know that it's tough

That is me in a scene
Father, he is tall and so serene
I said I'd believe
I declare a proven sign

Then I'm alone facing the snow
The rain falls hard and is blowing cold
I said I'd believe
When hell had frozen over

[Repeat chorus]

But who's to believe
That what I've seen really isn't true

[Repeat first verse]

Fun & Games is an ironic title for a collection of such grimly introspective songs. Either principal songwriter Michael Connell had gone through a very tough year or had listened to too many Smiths songs when he sat down with his bandmates to hammer out these tunes, which are 180 degrees from the mostly light, happy offerings on Darker Days and Boylan Heights. I'll have to give the band's fourth and fifth albums close listens to determine whether The Connells pulled a full-on Darth Vader or returned to their Anakinesque ways.

On a tenuously related note -- "Motel" references the Nativity story -- I just returned from an excellent family get together in Richmond for Christmas. A merry time was had by all (my sister Peggy and brother-in-law Scott's pics coming soon).

Listen to clip from "Motel"

Up Next: The Connells, One Simple Word, 1990

And That's What Christmas Is All About

Merry Christmas to all! I'm a little under the weather, so here's a holiday message instead of a regular post. I'll get back to my music collection after Christmas. Travel safe. Eat a fruitcake. Chug some nog. Definitely in that order.

================

And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angelsaid to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger."

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests."
When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about."

So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

-- Luke 2:8-20

I Will Recall It All for You

Album: The Connells, Boylan Heights, 1987

Acquired: I have no clue when or where I acquired this cassette. I know I owned it before I started my freshman year of college. Let's say I got this exactly the same way Indiana Jones got the golden statue at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Pretty cool, huh?

Best Track: "If It Crumbles"

Lasting Memory: I first heard The Connells in the spring of 1988 on a pioneering, independent alternative music station called 92.1 WOPM out of Moyock, N.C. OPM was a commercial station, but it's playlist was that of a student-run college station. Rather than Clapton, OPM would play Captain Beefheart. Def Leppard? How about some Dead Milkmen instead? I first hear a lot of bands that would become lifelong favorites on OPM.

Alas, the station was to good for this world of Tidewater and was in operation for only about two years. What doomed it was a hypocritical, mean-spirited, and shortsighted decision by the Virginia Beach City Council to deny OPM's request for a waiver of restrictions on building structures over a certain height below the Green Line. The Green Line was, and theoretically still is, an arbitrary boundary running across the middle of Virginia Beach that prevents the commercial and residential development of the Great Dismal Swamp and Back Bay.

OPM went silent in 1990 because its management wasn't allowed to set up a 25-foot radio tower on property that had existing structures. I currently live in a seven-year-old townhouse that is located below the Green Line, situated on marshland that used to be a semi-free range hog farm, and the realization of yet another Levittown daydream of one the East Coast's wealthiest developers. Score another one for the bad guys.

(My house is pretty sweet, though. Chances are excellent that I am sitting behind the windows with the red shutters even as you read this, and I'm saluting you. I'm even using all five fingers.)
In addition to lamenting the poor decisions of our elected leaders, I offer the above story in the spirit of making good on this post's title, which comes from the chorus of Boylan Heights' "Home Today":

Let's do it again
I will recall
There are things
I could have done
I will recall
There are things
I should have shown
I will recall
It all for you

I can't recall it all, though, which I'll have to lament. I will also have to someday get around to lamenting my own small part in sealing OPM's untimely fate. I never quite found the time to sign the petition the station circulated at Tidewater area record and guitar shops to get the City Council to reconsider. I will not, however, give voice to "Scotty's Lament":

It's you I swear
It's you I swear
I delight in your despair
(I'll wait for you)
It's you I swear
It's you I swear
Giving me the right
(I'll wait for you)
It's you who lied
It's you who lied
When you had to swallow pride
(I'll wait for you)
It's you I swear
It's you I swear...

I mean, you didn't do anything wrong, and I'll be damned if I'm going to just stand around until you do. I have my own inactions to take and later decry.

Exactly what those will be, I can't say. All will be known in the fullness of times, as The Connells acknowledged in "If It Crumbles":

And for the first and
for the last time
I'll wait and see.
And if it crumbles all around me
Then we'll wait and see

Listen to "If It Crumbles"

Up Next: The Connells, Fun & Games, 1989

Editor's Note: The Fun & Games post will make more sense. I am just feeling very stream-of-consciousy today. Thanks for playing along.

I Truly Have Seen Darker Days

Album: The Connells, Darker Days, 1987 (TVT Records reissue of the band's self-published 1985 debut album)

Acquired: I can't remember for sure, but I'm guessing I picked this up at The Record Exchange or Books, Strings 'n' Things in Blacksburg during my sophomore year of college. The Connells were as big as they were ever going to get in 1990 and 1991, and everybody at Virginia Tech loved the boys from Raleigh.

Best Track: "Darker Days (Version)"

Lasting Memory: I met The Connells in the spring of 1991 after a show they did at the Roanoke Civic Center. How that happened is a boring story that is only worth telling because it gives me a chance to brag on myself and the time I spent doing stand-up comedy.

The shortest version of the story is that my buddy and then-roommate Dave was taking an English class taught by the woman who was the manager/den mother for a local band named Yams from Outerspace. The English professor happened to think I was one of the funniest people in the world, and she convinced Dave to convince me to give some guest lectures in her classes about the theory of comedy. (Did I mention this professor, who while she was an incredibly nice person and obviously had great taste in stand-up, drank bull-killing amounts of whiskey and wine?)

In a chain of other events, one of which may have a promise of extra credit for Dave, Dave and I would up manning the Yams merch table at the Roanoke Civic Center when they opened for The Connells. We also got front row center seats for the second half of The Connells' set and passes to go backstage and drink band beers.

A neighbor of our, Andrea, was obsessed with The Connells. I got all the members of the band to sign a show flyer for her, and she was ecstatic. Andrea was so pretty. And her boyfriend was such a putz. Sigh.

I've always wondered why more people weren't obsessed with The Connells. Their sound is THE sound of late eighties alternative rock, combining all the best elements of R.E.M., The Smiths, and Hüsker Dü while leaving out the trappings of self-importance, bathos, and fuzztone for fuzztone's sake.

The Connells are all jangle, alto, and clever wordplay all the time. You can just enjoy the tunes without having to relate. The bands' songs do seem to be trying to be about something, but they really aren't. Check out these first few verses of Darker Days' "Hats Off," for instance:

You love to change your mind
Hate to see you lost in your ignorance, or is it just indifference?
What goes on behind?
What goes on within you, without you, there's nothing to you

Why are you so blind?
Why are you so hopelessly helpless, hopelessly helpless?
You can't have it back.
No you can't have the world as it once was with cowboys and Santa Claus

With all your charm, all your cleverness
It's not enough, we'd be better off with something else
It's not enough, and all my thoughts, all my bitterness
Still not enough with all your charm and all . . .

Sound? Check. Fury? Check. Signifying? Nothing. And that's okay. Because, as I clumsily argued twice in my Clash posts, rock music should be about rocking most of the time. A good ninety-three-point-seven percent of the time, the heavy themes should be left to the folkies.

When rock music does have to be about something, happiness is always a good choice. It's the choice The Connells made in the title track to Darker Days, where the message is in the chorus and middle verse:

Oh, I have seen, darker days.
Oh, I have seen, darker days.

Saw you in the half-dream, safe from view.
Lost you in the waking, but I knew.
Words are words and I would, try to find.
Better ways to let you leave those days behind

Listen to "Darker Days"

Up Next: The Connells, Boylan Heights, 1987

Yep, it's another theme week here on the Magical Musical Journey ... . Settle in and enjoy the ride.

He's in Love With Rock 'n' Roll, Whoah

Album: The Clash, The Story of The Clash, Volume 1 (Sides 3&4), 1988

Best Track: "Career Opportunities"

I was probably unfair to The Clash in yesterday's post when I wrote, in so many words, that listeners could easily ignore the band's politics because those politics were a pose. I've no doubt that principal Clash songwriters Joe Strummer and Mick Jones felt strongly about the need for social justice and that they believed it was their job to open the kids' minds with their message songs. I'll even concede that they succeeded to some extent since I wouldn't know anything about the racial tensions of 1970s London if I had never heard "Guns of Brixton."

I will continue to argue, however, that The Clash's best songs are the ones about regular rock 'n' roll topics like lost love, teenage directionlessness, and rockin'. This is not a criticism of the band. If rocking is your business, and that business is good, then good on ya. And if you do have to bring politics into the discussion, keep those politics personal.

The Clash did this to a large extent in the songs included on the third and fourth sides of their absolutely essential career retrospective. "White Riot," for instance, is the inner dialog of a white supremacist presented for your derision. "White Man in Hammer Palais" is a cutting critique of white bands who ignore or deride black music while either intentionally or unintentionally stealing all their tricks from that deep well. (The Clash acknowledged and praised their reggae influences.)

Where The Clash lose their traction is when they get to songs like "Spanish Bombs," which while sounding incredibly cool, can't accomplish much more than make listeners to scratch their heads. A song about the Spanish Civil War recorded two years after Franco's death? Really?

Let's rein it in, guys. Do more songs like "Janie Jones," which begins

He’s in love with rock ‘n’ roll, woah
He’s in love with getting stoned, woah
He’s in love with Janie Jones, woah
He don’t like his boring job no ...

Or if you just have to let your inner anarchist out to play a few riffs, make sure he knows the tabs and words to "Career Opportunities":

They offered me the office, offered me the shop
They said I better take anything they got
Do you wanna make tea at the BBC?
Do you wanna be, do really wanna be a cop?

Career opportunities are the ones that never knock
Every job they offer you is to keep out the dock
Career opportunities, the ones that never knock

I hate the army and I hate the RAF
I don’t wanna go fighting in the tropical heat
I hate the civil service rules
And I won’t open letter bombs for you

Career opportunities are the ones that never knock
Every job they offer you is to keep out the dock
Career opportunities, the ones that never knock

Bus driver!
Ambulance man!
Ticket inspector!
I don't understand!

They’re gonna have to introduce conscription
They’re gonna have to take away my prescription
If they wanna get me making toys
If they wanna get me, well hell I got not choice

Career opportunities are the ones that never knock
Every job they offer you is to keep out the dock
Career opportunities, the ones that never knock

Careers
Careers
Careers
Ain’t a-never gonna knock

Click here to see a live performance of "Career Opportunities"

Click here to learn more about Career Opportunities star Jennifer Connelly

Up Next: The Connells, Darker Days, 1987 (a TVT Records reissue of the self-released 1985 debut album)

The Only Tape That Really Matters

Album: The Clash, The Story of the Clash, Volume 1 (Sides 1&2), 1988

Acquired: I got this from a record store in Pembroke Mall during the summer of 1989, which was my only summer at home during my, ahem, lengthy college career. Like all great summers home from college, mine was spent working as a lot attendant/carwasher at a friend of the family's rental car lot. I should have been forced to wear a "Stay in School" T-shirt on that job.

Best Tracks: "Train in Vain" and "The Guns of Brixton"

Lasting Memory: Two here, too. The first is buying this double album on cassette and pulling a double-long security bracket out of the tapes rack at the record store. These tunes were encased in so much plastic that, somewhere, a young Al Gore was shedding an Iron Eyes Cody-esque tear. The second is hanging a London Calling poster in every college dorm and apartment I ever lived in. That's rock 'n' roll with a capital F-U.

The song "London Calling" was the title track to The Clash's 1979 double album that broke them through in the United States (somewhat), and it serves as a nice overview of what the band was about sonically and politically. Listen here and dig that punning but pained chorus of ""The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in/ Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin/ Engines stop running, but I have no fear/ 'Cause London is drowning and I, live by the river."

It was songs like this that led The Clash's record label, Epic, to promote them as "The Only Band That Matters." Now I love me some Clash, but a marketing line that like begs the questions of "matters to whom, and matters for what?" The answers to those questions are, of course, to the band member's family members who could be proud of their boys and for fans of punk rock that tended toward early ska. The latter group is smaller than one would imagine, as London Calling didn't go gold -- that is, sell 500,000 units -- in the United States until the late 1990s, according to a factoid I saw on the digital music cable channel Retroactive. The poster has probably sold better than the album.

Billy Bragg was correct in singing in "Waiting for the Great Leap Forward" that kids should "Join the struggle while you may/ The revolution is just a T-shirt away." And that's fine. Because revolutions generally just make a bigger mess than existed in the first place.

A case in point is "Guns of Brixton," which tells the story of the Jamaican immigrant riots in London during the late 1970s:

When they kick out your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun

When the law break in
How you gonna go?
Shot down on the pavement
Or waiting in death row

You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you'll have to answer to
Oh, Guns of Brixton

The money feels good
And your life you like it well
But surely your time will come
As in heaven, as in hell

You see, he feels like Ivan
Born under the Brixton sun
His game is called survivin'
At the end of the harder they come

You know it means no mercy
They caught him with a gun
No need for the Black Maria
Goodbye to the Brixton sun

You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you'll have to answer to
Oh-the guns of Brixton

When they kick out your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun

You can crush us
You can bruise us
And even shoot us
But oh- the guns of Brixton

Shot down on the pavement
Waiting in death row
His game was survivin'
As in heaven as in hell

You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you'll have to answer to
Oh, the guns of Brixton

As white guys, the members of The Clash's only dog in the Jamaicans' fight were Scotland Yard's police dogs. But it is ever the case that revolutionaries revolting for the sake of revolting tend to wander away from their causes when they start, you know, noticing girls and stuff. As evidence, I submit "Train in Vain::

Say you stand by your man
Tell me something I don't understand
You said you loved me and that's a fact
And then you left me, said you felt trapped

Well some things you can't explain away
But the heartache's in me till this day

[Chorus]
You didn't you stand by me
No, not at all
You didn't stand by me
No way

All the times
When we were close
I'll remember these things the most
I see all my dreams come tumbling down
I can't be happy without you round

So alone I keep the wolves at bay
and there is only one thing that I can say

[Repeat chorus]

You must explain why this must be
Did you lie when you spoke to me

Did you stand by me
No, not at all

Now I got a job
But it don't pay
I need new clothes
I need somewhere to stay
But without all of these things I can do
But without your love I won't make it through

But you don't understand my point of view
I suppose there's nothing I can do

[Repeat chorus twice]

You must explain why this must be
Did you lie when you spoke to me

Did you stand by me
Did you stand by me
No, not at all
Did you stand by me
No way

The Clash are lionized for songs like "Guns of Brixton," but "Train in Vain" is what gets played on the radio, along with their other confused lover song "Should I Stay or Should I Go." I'm with the radio programmers for once. I say that when push comes to Clash, you should listen to the music and leave the politics on the side.

Watch a video for "Guns of Brixton"

Watch a live performance of "Train in Vain"

Up Next: The Clash, The Story of the Clash, Volume 1 (Sides 3&4)

Joke for a Sunday

This week's joke was inspired by my sister's just concluded week of postings about her and our mother's cooking. It is also more than a little stolen from the inimitable Terry Pratchett.

==============

A Klatchian mother, struggling to make ends ends meat, or at least one end less vegetable, walks into an Ankh-Morpork butcher shop and asks the countertroll for the only thing she can afford.

"One day-old sheep's head," the woman requests meekly.

As the troll is calling the order back into the cutting room, the woman's son pulls at the hem of her skirt and says exictedly, "Make sure the butcher leaves the eyes in, Mum. Make sure it's with eyes."

Puzzled, the mother asks why, and the boy says, "Because that 'ead needs to see us through all next week!"

==============

See you at the Fools' Guild reunion.

Keep a good thought for Pratchett and find out which Discworld character you are. (The test is kind of lame, but it's better than nothing.)

What Does That Make God, Then?

Album: Eric Clapton, 1983 (a cassette reissue of a Polydor compilation that was originally released in the Netherlands in 1970 as part of the Music for the Millions series)

(Aside: The picture to the left is the album cover for the 1970 release Eric Clapton & Friends. I've gone through two periods in my life -- my first year of grad school and about seven months of my first year of freelancing -- when I cultivated a similar too much hair and shaggy beard look. It isn't as liberating as it appears. If nothing else, just consider how much time a guy who looks like this spends each morning unclogging the drain from yesterday's shower. But maybe that wasn't as big a concern for Mr. Clapton and his compatriots.)

(Another aside: Why am I'm flagging paragraphs as asides? Isn't everything I write in this blog discursive? For example, I know feel compelled to tell you that Webster's defines "discursive" as meaning "a: moving from topic to topic without order : rambling b: proceeding coherently from topic to topic." And telling you that compels me to observe that if I am being discursive, I'm either wasting everyone's time, or I'm busily making myself into a modern-day Daniel O'Connell. You tell me.)

Acquired: I purchased the Clapton compilation at the Little Creek Navy Exchange in 1983. Post exchanges used to be great places to find all kinds of esoterica because the Department of Defense just bought stuff that vendors could deliver for cheap. That could be Wedgwood china, or it could be semibootlegged greatest hits collections on cassette. Px's have gradually turned into Targets, which I guess is a good thing for customers, but it was cool to never quite know from week to week what would be on the shelves.

Best Track: "Layla"

Lasting Memory: I have a distinct memory of listening to "Bell Bottom Blues" on a winter night in 1986 while sitting in the backseat of a car being driven by a named Craig as all seven of us passengers tried to figure out which of the houses in the Ghent neighborhood we were cruising through was the one having the kegger. Good times, man. Good times.

Beyond the pithy observation that a Clapton song has definitely provided the soundtrack to at least one, and probably several, of your own sepia-toned memories, I've nothing much to say about Clapton the artist or Eric Clapton the 1970 compilation. He was good. This cassette, even though it is in mono, reflects that.

I do have a couple of questions, though:

1. If Clapton is indeed God, as the London graffiti of the mid-1960s proclaimed, does that mean Jesus was a rhythm guitarist for the Apostles?
2. How can the very man who wrote and recorded the jaw-dropping original have turned into such a college-town coffee shop hack?
3. What are you gonna do when the room gets lonely?

I won't link to a clip or video for a good version of "Layla." If you can't find a radio station that will play that within the next hour, you need to move.

Up Next: The Clash, The Story of the Clash (Sides 1&2), 1988

If Toby Keith Knew Irony

Album: Circle Jerks, Wönderful, 1985

Acquired: I picked this up at a skate shop in downtown Norfolk in 1986. I didn't skate -- too lummoxy -- but my friends at the time did. Posers unite. Or untie. Or something.

Best Track: "Mrs. Jones"

Lasting Memory: In December 1987, the Norfolk Catholic Crusader wrestling team traveled to Green Run High School for a tri-meet with that school's Stallions and the Cox Falcons. My Crusaders -- I wrestled heavyweight -- narrowly defeated the Stallions even though Green Run had around 3,000 students, while Catholic had an enrollment of just over 400. The Falcons, who were defending Virginia AAA state champions steamrolled us Crusaders 60-0. I was pinned in the third period by the Cox heavyweight, who was a two-time state title winner.

But that's not what I'm here to tell you about. What I'm here to tell you about is how even though Green Run had a really bad team, they did this very cool thing at the beginning of each home match where they ran out of the locker room to a blasting heavy metal song. At Catholic, we just sort of shuffled out of the locker room and waited for the ref to say it was time to stop chewing gum and start kicking ass.

On the bus home from the Green Rum tri, we were debating whether we should do a musical entry into the arena. Joe, our 98 pounder, had the winning but never implemented suggestion: He said it would only make sense for the Crusaders to take the mat to the inspiring refrains of the Circle Jerks' "Killing for Jesus."

If you just clicked and came back, please keep your politics in your pants. I also think the video is sophomoric and baiting, but then so would have been a bunch of Catholic high school kids alerting their opponents that pinning them was all part of God's ineffable plan. Neither quite rises to the level of irony, but both are good for a cheap laugh.

If nothing else, one has to give the Circle Jerks credit for understanding the value of the cheap laugh. The band name alone is a dead giveaway, there. I will also give credit to the band's members for being better musicians than practically any of their '80s California punk peers and for actually trying to make politically and socioeconomically relevant points.

The weird thing that struck me this morning, though, is that if they read without the intended (and delivered on record) snark and sneer, the overwhelming majority of the lyrics on Wönderful could be sung by Toby Keith or even Michael W. Smith and receive roars of approval from your average 2007 country music fan.

The second verse of the title track admonishes the kids

Don't smoke, don't litter
Don't step on a beetle or ant
Always walk on the sidewalk
Never tread on the grass
Be kind, be courteous
Open the door for your mom
Help an old person across the street
Give the bum something to eat

In "Making the Bombs," the Circle Jerks do a fine job of giving voice to the inner dialogue of the patriot Toby Keith caricatures in "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)." Don't believe me? Here's a few verses from the Circle Jerks:

I spend my nights in the factory
Building bombs for the good of the nation
It's my job can't you see?
Massive plutonium radiation
They're gonna rock and destroy
Made from the finest of alloys
They're gonna fly under the radar
Six feet over the Russian horizon

[Chorus:]
Making The Bombs!
Making The Bombs!

I install electronic components
The little chips that know where home is
I get a thrill going through my section
When I give 'em my final inspection
I like the kind that save the buildings
Why take it out on pillars of stone?
You gotta kill you gotta maim
The real estate is not to blame

[Repeat chorus]

Making the world a nicer place
For us to be
Making the world a safer place
For you and me

Now here's a good bit of what Keith sings:

Now this nation that I love
Has fallen under attack
A mighty sucker punch came flyin’ in
From somewhere in the back
Soon as we could see clearly
Through our big black eye
Man, we lit up your world
Like the 4th of July

Hey Uncle Sam
Put your name at the top of his list
And the Statue of Liberty
Started shakin’ her fist
And the eagle will fly
Man, it’s gonna be hell
When you hear Mother Freedom
Start ringin’ her bell
And it feels like the whole wide world is raining down on you
Brought to you Courtesy of the Red White and Blue

Justice will be served
And the battle will rage
This big dog will fight
When you rattle his cage
And you’ll be sorry that you messed with
The U.S. of A.
`Cause we'll put a boot in your ass
It's the American way

The intent is undeniably different, but the words are shockingly similar. I guess politics, like comedy, is all in the delivery.

Listen to a clip from "Mrs. Jones"

Up Next: Eric Clapton, 1983 (A cassette reissue of a Polydor compilation that was originally released in the Netherlands in 1970 as part of the Music for the Millions series)

Don't Call It a Comeback

Album: Johnny Cash, American Recordings, 1994

Acquired: I either bought this at the Little Creek Exchange around Christmas 1994, or I received it as a Christmas present that year. My money is on "present," but I'm a horrible gambler.

Best Track: "The Beast in Me"

Lasting Memory: The image of then-62-year-old Johnny Cash carrying the body of then-20-year-old Kate Moss to the grave during the video for this album's "Delia's Gone" is one that will be etched in my mind well after I've forgotten all ya'lls names. Creepy.

But also iconic and perfectly fitting for a song about an enraged former lover who ties his ex-girlfriend to chair and shoots her with a "submochine" set on single-fire. A romantic to the end, the killer notes, "Hurt to a watch her suffer/ But with the second shot she died."

I mentioned murder ballads in my previous post, and "Delia's Gone" is an excellent modern day American take on the traditional Scottish/English/Irish form. In fact, everything on American Recordings in an excellent take on a specific subgenre, not all of which Cash was known to explore.

"Thirteen" is a cover of a song by horror punk pioneer Glenn Danzig that tells the tale of an evil loner who was named and tattooed 13 and never had a chance to turn out good. "Bird on a Wire" is a Leonard Cohen song, which doesn't place it too far outside Cash's usual oeuvre. But when you realize that Cohen is Canadian ... I mean, why did Johnny hate America?

Cash didn't hate America, of course, but he had plenty of self-remorse. Always at heart a loving family man, a man of deep Christian faith, and a man who worked for equal justice and prosperity (including Native American land rights), Cash was also a booze-guzzling, pill-popping hell-raiser for much of his adult life. The two sides of himself -- allegorically pictured as the black dog with white markings and the white dog with black markings on American Recording's album cover -- were constantly at war.

Cash literally lived in a cave for several months in the late 1960s so he could go through his dark night of the soul in darkness and battle his twin demons of amphetamine and barbiturate addiction in a location where the pills couldn't summon reinforcements. The victory he won was temporary, however. He relapsed into drug addiction -- painkillers this time -- in the 1980s.

Finally clean and sober for good by the early 1990s, Cash found himself without a record contract and relegated to obscurity by a country radio industry that was busy creating stars such as [insert your own most insipid hat act here; my nod goes to Star Search champs Diamond Rio]. Fortunately for all of mankind, erstwhile Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Public Enemy, and (hey!) Danzig producer Rick Rubin was smart enough to sit down with Cash, a guitar, and a microphone and produce American Recordings.

Cash had never totally gone away, so it is incorrect to call AR a comeback album. Also, rather than rejuvenated, Cash here sounds resigned and regretful. To my ears, AR is built around "The Beast in Me":

The beast in me
Is caged by frail and fragile bars
Restless by day
And by night rants and rages at the stars
God help the beast in me

The beast in me
Has had to learn to live with pain
And how to shelter from the rain
And in the twinkling of an eye
Might have to be restrained
God help the beast in me

Sometimes it tries to kid me
That it's just a teddy bear
And even somehow manage to vanish in the air
And that is when I must beware
Of the beast in me that everybody knows
They've seen him out dressed in my clothes

Patently unclear
If it's New York or New Year
God help the beast in me

The beast in me

Even though he refused to take pain medications after around 1988, Cash never believed he had fully defeated his beast. That must have been awful for him. For the rest of us, it meant he turned out some of his best work in his last decade of life.

Watch the video for "The Best in Me"

Up Next: Circle Jerks, Wönderful, 1994

Teenage Love, Train Wrecks, and Time Served

Album: The Johnny Cash Collection, 1988

Acquired: I picked this up in a mall in Baton Rouge during the Great State Bank Supervisors tour of 1993. My sister and I spent a lot time in the Saturn. We had to have new tunes at irregular intervals. Plus, I had to spend time and money doing something while Clair was making her business calls. I went to malls and historical sites. You'd be surprised how few of either of those there are in towns like Albany, Miss. At least Baton Rouge has a college, state capitol, malls, and levees. That was the first time I ever saw a levee, which, SPOILER ALERT, is really nothing more than a hill between a river and a ditch. It's no wonder they fail.

Best Track: "The Ways of a Woman in Love"

Lasting Memory: My most distinct memory of listening to The Johnny Cash Collection involves the very first time I played it. After leaving the mall, I slipped the tape into the car stereo and set off back to the hotel. Both the mall and the hotel were in the city of BR proper, and the LSU campus lay between my particular points A and B. My route included about two miles of semidirt road. Exactly what did Huey Long accomplish? (I mock even as I tell the truth, but I should also point out that Montgomery County, home to Virginia Tech, had hundreds of miles of dirt roads during the late '80s and early '90s while I was matriculating.)

Many of the songs featured on this apparently unlicensed Johnny Cash greatest hits compilation from Italy evoke specific memories of their own. I can certainly never hear "Ring of Fire" without flashing back to seeing once and future Social Distortion lead singer Mike Ness ripping through his cover version during a solo concert at Washington, D.C.'s 9:30 Club. "Folsom Prison Blues" is every night I ever worked or socialized at Raven Bar & Grill. (By the way, if you go to this link and see the guy who wrote about getting kicked out of the Raven three times, be 100 percent assured that the guy is an absolute ass. It is nearly impossible to get bounced from the Raven for anything other than fighting, sleeping, or puking on the bar/bartender.)

I could go through The Johnny Cash Collection song by song and anecdotalize, but that would be self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing. And who at any point has ever used the blogosphere for self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement? I certainly wouldn't want to be the first.

What I will do is note that this particular collection gives second life to Cash songs that were hits in their day but are far outside the canon. Notable among these "oh yeah, that song" inclusions are "The Wreck of the Old '97," "Ballad of a Teenage Queen," and "The Ways of a Woman in Love." The first is a story song about a train engineer who misses a curve running down a Virginia mountain between the towns of Lynchburg and Danville, blows out his airbrake, and dies with his hands still on the throttle. It's also the source of the name of the kickass alt-country band Old 97's.

"Ballad" is a bit of teenybopper fluff about a small-town girl who goes to Hollywood to become a star but returns to the middle of nowhere to marry the boy from the candy store who she never stopped loving.

"The Ways of a Woman in Love" deserves quoting.

You've cut out your dancin'
And you never see a show
Friends drop by to pick you up
And you hardly ever go

It seems your head is in the clouds above
You've got the ways of a woman in love

I walk by your house at night
In the hopes that I might see
The guy who's got you in a spin
I wish that guy was me
I don't know why it's you
I'm dreamin' of
You've got the ways of a woman in love

Many is the night I've stayed awake and cried
Now you'll never know how much you've hurt my foolish pride

I recall your kisses
The times I held you tight
Now when I come to see you
You're sittin' in the light
Missing all the things that we dreamed of
You've got the ways of a woman in love.

While this is undeniably a stalker anthem (hello, "Every Breath You Take") teetering on the edge of becoming a murder ballad (hello, "Banks of the Ohio"), "Ways" is also undeniably sweet. Listeners can't help but feel bad for the boy who is sad because his ex-girlfriend is happy. A listener also can't help but relate with one of the characters in the song. Which character that is at any given time will depend.

The value of having a song like "Ways" play alongside a better known Cash song like "Folsom Prison Blues" is that it presents fuller picture of the man's discography, which is almost unbelievably extensive and diverse. The juxtaposition also gives a sense of how Cash delved into all aspects of the human condition and, as both a songwriter and interpreter of others' works, sicceeded in illuminating how people live, love, and pray. It is telling that an excellent Cash career retrospective issued by his longtime label Columbia in 2000 was titled Love, God and Murder.

Up Next: Johnny Cash, American Recordings, 1994

Joke for a Sunday

Give the people what they want.

========

Sean: Oi, Michael, didja hear Finnegan's changed their "Irish Seven Course Meal" special? Made it better than ever.

Michael: How's that then? What's better'n six pints and a potato?

Sean: Now, they let you substitute a pint for the potato.

========

See you at Finnegan's.

What Happened to You

Album: The Call, Red Moon, 1990

Acquired: I picked this up from the same bargain tape rack in a Nashville mall music store that yielded my much-played Blue Rodeo Casino cassette. As much as I love me some Call, I have only even listened to Red Moon maybe 10 times in the 14 years I've owned it.

Best Track: "This Is Your Life"

Lasting Memory: I can't honestly write that I have any specific memories of this album. That makes The Call four for four in this category. But whereas Modern Romans, Reconciled, and Let the Day Begin tend to run through too many of my thoughts and life experiences for me to choose one as outstanding, Red Moon doesn't run through any. Three of the albums have been personally permeative (yeah, it's a real word); the other has been surfactant (again, blame Messrs. Merriam & Webster).

This is not the band's fault. The lyrics of the songs on Red Moon are great, and the vocals and musicianship put most bands' offerings to shame. I just don't remember Red Moon because I have never really listened to it. The reason I've never really listened to Red Moon is because the album was never one that was for or about me.

Nearly all the characters and narrators on this album have found their purpose, their place, their people, and their peace. The central question of "What Happened to You" isn't being asked, as it usually is, to get the hearer to figure out what went wrong. Instead, the narrator wants to know what the other person has seen, heard, or done to stop being shy, tired, mealymouthed, and mean-spirited. Another character finds solace in occasionally "Floating Back" to a "you" that could be God, a friend, a family member, or a lover. Who the you is doesn't matter so much as the sense of completeness and safety that person provides.

While "You Were There" lays out all the world's problems that one person on his or her own could never solve, "A Swim in the Ocean" states the obvious truth that individuals tend to make their own problems and can minimize them by worrying less and enjoying more. The latter song also has a nice bit of like-it-or-lump-itness:

I'm too young to have problems
I'm too old to play games
I'm to wise to be standing
Standing in the pouring rain

I'm too smart to be hungry
I'm too hard to be meek
I'm too proud to be sorry
I'm too strong to be weak

[Chorus]
Go take a swim in the ocean
Go take a swim in the sea
Go take a swim in the ocean
Who's gonna care about me

In "Family," which has to be even more autobiographical than most of Michael Been's songs -- and that would make it a candidate for the most autobiographical song ever -- Been sings to his own parents

Now that I'm grown with a child of my own
I reflect on the years
The love that was lost, we all paid a cost
With a life filled with tears
Oh but I loved you dear
Let us move from here

I won't belabor what that means, but I will mention that Been currently produces, writes, and sometimes performs with his son's band, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. He's learned his lessons well.

It is almost definitely neither a coincidence nor a vagary of the record business that Red Moon is the second to last studio album The Call recorded. Their last album, To Heaven and Back, was released in 1997.

By 1990, the band's members had literally grown up on DAT over a 7-year period of constant touring and work in the studio and had said all they needed to say. They certainly must have figured they had no reason to kill themselves to land a new record deal when they had already exorcised their demons, built strong family lives, and could still play gigs when and where they wanted to for the rest of their lives.

I've gone and on, and I've quoted and quoted, in this post because I now do very nearly relate to what The Call was getting at with Red Moon. I'm settled. I'm happy. I have good relations with family members. I have money in the bank. I'm involved with volunteer work. I'm being paid to stay involved with my favorite sport. I'm even going to church again. Life is good. Substitute "my" for "you" in "This Is Your Life":

[Chorus]
This is your life
This is your world
Beginning to end
This is the price of heaven, our hope
This is the time
This is your life

The push and the pull
We give and we take
We rise and we fall
We bend til we break
The future is ours
The promise is true
This your life
I've seen it before
I've seen many times
An impossible task cut down to size
We stand in the breach
We fight at the front
This is your life

[Repeat chorus]

We've all grown up together
It's a shame we grow apart

A world without end
A stroll through the fire
The journey depends
On the length of the wire
We're rarely at ease
The pressure is high
This is your life
So it begins
We reach for the stars
Lift up your voice
Freedom is yours
The spirit's alive
Oh what a ride
This your life

[Repeat chorus]

This is your life
This is your world
The struggle begins
This the price of heaven, our hope
This is your chance
This is your life

No clip for today's best track. Feel free to pass along any you stumble across. Also, probably no new posts until Sunday.

Up Next: The Johnny Cash Collection, 1988 (a probably unauthorized, and certainly noncanonical collection of Johnny Cash's early 1960s hit singles published by an Italian company called Deja Vu Records)

Let the Day Begin ... For Love

Album: The Call, Let the Day Begin, 1989

Acquired: I bought this at Mother's Record & Tape Company in 1989. Then I lent it to my sister Sue and didn't get it back again until 1997 or 1998, whenever my parents moved out of their old home, and I saw that the cassette had slipped behind a bookcase. Oddly, I didn't miss this album while it was actually missing, but I was really glad to get it back once I did.

Best Track: "You Run"

Lasting Memory: Another odd thing, to me at least, is that this the third of three Call albums that I don't associate with a specific time, place, or event. Let the Day Begin is appropriate to and evocative of so many situations that in a lot of ways, the album just is and has been. It goes with everything, kind of like a pair of nice black shoes. If, that is, the shoes could express existential longings and universal truths about the importance of just getting on with living.

I guess you could call me out on immediately contradicting myself about the no lasting memory thing since I just told the story about losing and finding the cassette. If you did, I would strongly equivocate that the anecdote in question is not a specific memory but instead a short history of events that go some way toward illuminating the human condition.

Ah, the refuge of rhetoric. Proves I didn't go to grad school for nothing.

However, I would be, and am, serious about what The Call was up to when they created and recorded their songs. The title of today's post conjoins the titles of the first song on Side A of Let the Day Begin -- the title track -- and the title of the first song on Side B -- "For Love." You've probably heard the title track, which was a decent-sized hit and is an adult version of the preschool standard "Good Morning to You." The Call's song cites the ordinariness of people doing their jobs and interacting with their peers as the special kind of heroism it is. Man, it's tough but necessary to get out of bed everyday, clothe yourself and your kids, teach, police, coach, or blog. But we do, and the efforts aren't pointless, dammit.

The efforts aren't pointless because we have an ultimate goal for work for. We're working "For Love," which is a story song about a Foreign Legion soldier who rides into the desert hunting thieves, gets wounded and stranded, and is eventually rescued and the following conversations with his rescuer and, much later, his wife or girlfriend. The conversations overlap, and the speakers switches from soldier to rescuer to wife/girlfriend to rescuer to soldier.

I went higher than I'd ever been before
I went lower than the depths could hold
I said a prayer, then without warning
A figure rose up from the desert floor
He looked ate me, said, "How high are you?"
I looked at him with my one good eye
We just smiled and stared in silence
He did it all for a chance to die for love

We think again on the dreams that made us
As I stare into your beautiful eyes
There came a day when the words had meaning
The skies cried and the waters came rushing
I do believe you are the lone survivor
I suspect of you the bravest deeds
He just smiled and said it's all worth it
I fell down on my knees and cried, for love

The Call's first album (profiled three posts down) features songs about people who were scared, scarred, and betrayed. Their third album, appropriately titled Reconciled, features primarily songs about people who have persevered and persisted in their lives and their faith in God. Let the Day Begin, the fourth Call album, gives evidence that things denied, lost, hoped for, and worked for aren't not only retrievable and achievable, but in some ways inevitable as long as we don't give up. Another of my favorite bands, The Tragically Hip, address this elliptically in a song titled "It's a Good Life if You Don't Weaken." The Call are much more straightforward in "You Run":

You may find a better way
You may find the reason for it all
Say you've walked on hollowed ground
Say you've heard the sweetest sound of all
But you find out that you never really cared at all
And you find out that you have no love to share at all

So you challenge everyone you meet
Crying out to fill a void in you
What are you running from my love
What's this thing you're guilty of
Follow me and never feel accused
But you never do believe a word I say
And you never did believe there'd be a day of reckoning

[Chorus]
So you run and you run and you run
And you never stop
And you work and you work and you work
Until you drop
You're in over your head and the pressure just don't quit
But you can't escape the reach of love

Faces haunt you in your dreams
Struggles of a broken heart I fear
Waking from a fitful sleep
Dutifully appointments keep
Try to hold the image of respect
So someone tells you when and where to go
But all the time you never really show your feelings

[Repeat chorus]

You may find a better way
You may find the reason for it all
You may hold a better hand
All your pride and understanding
Never really feeling love at all
But what you thought were different worlds apart
Pulls you in and wraps around your heart forever

[Repeat chorus twice]
So you push and you push and you push
Until you drop
Oh, you run
Oh, you run

Keep on running. But let love catch you every now and then.

Watch an acoustic performance of "You Run"

Up Next: The Call, Red Moon, 1990

I Still Believe

Album: The Call, Reconciled, 1986

Acquired: As with this band's Modern Romans, I'm not at all sure when or where I picked up Reconciled. I am very glad to own it, though. Just for the sake of outrageously lying to make myself look cool, I'll say that Michael Been, lead singer and head songwriter for The Call, hand-delivered this tape to my dorm room at Virginia Tech on November 2, 1988.

Best Track: "Even Now"

Lasting Memory: I would swear that every bodybuilding and fitness competition I've ever not really watched has had at least one poser perform to this album's "I Still Believe." Which both make sense and is very odd.

The song itself is a sonic bonfire. It is a four-minute-and-twenty-four-second crescendo. The intensity builds and builds to the end. And it is in three-quarters waltz time, so you can dance to it.

The lyrics, however, are about all of the band members' recommittment to Christianity. There is no metaphor or allegory involved. One commentator has even gone so far as to claim that the song is the quintessential Christian rock song.

The narrator was "Stuck in a cave/ For forty days." He had "Only a spark/ To light my way." But he tells anyone who can hear his howl into the void, "I still believe!/ I still believe/ Through the pain/ And through the years." I grok that affirmation of faith, but I have to wonder how Jesus feels about steroid use.

Many of the songs on Reconciled are statements of faith. That's not rock, but it sure is cool. And it gives The Call a reason to greet each day and each challenge as an opportunity to be the men they know they should be. Check out "Even Now":

Chased, chased
Out into the woods
Footsteps close behind my back
I never knew how close I stood
Shame has brought me to my knees
Love protects the heart
It is just as you please

Fights, fights
Up and down each shore
We may be outnumbered here
The lions start to roar
Cry, cry for all to hear
Cry, the world goes on

Would you lend me your ear for a moment
I still care even now

Chased, chased
By the angry mob
Trying to steal my heart from me
Steal from me my love for God
Watch as stars fall from the sky
Wait until the oceans dry up

But even then
I still feel loved
Even so, I feel cared for
Even now

So look in my eyes again
Do you recognize my face
One of despair again
Is it gone without a trace
I feel I’m alive again
Rescued from the void
Here I’m alone with you
Here I’m at home with you
Even now

Look, look
They’re running close behind
Those you thought your enemies
Are friends now standing by your side
Fight for every step you take
Shaped by every lie you’ve ever heard

Pain, pain
The pain I’ve been forced to see
Blame, the blame belongs
To no one but me

But oh, I still care
Even so, I still feel loved
Even so, even here, even now

Even at their lowest, The Call are ready and willing to assume the best. That's a worldview we would all would do well to adopt.

Listen to a clip from "Even Now"

Up Next: The Call, Let the Day Begin, 1989

Word Count to Date: A lot. More than 21,000. Which is less than half of the 50,000 words participants in the November-long National Novel Writing Month have as their Web site-mandated goal.

Some of the NaNoWriMo participants must have hit their target word count. To them, I say, "Congratulations. You suck." I salute those people's effort even as I have to ask them , "Um, why did you do that?"

I am the first to acknowledge that the only way to write is to write. That statement is neither original to me nor in any way truly insightful. The only way to write well, however, is to revise, reivse, revise. Again, those words are not mine, but they do encapsulate a universe of eye-opening truth.

You may not be able to tell, but each of my posts to this site takes about two hours to write. I do a little research. I spell-check. I read through every sentence a couple of times and edit the text before I hit the Publish Post button. I don't even care if you appreciate all the work I'm doing. I would refuse to publish anything I didn't think was good. You're allowed -- sometimes even encouraged -- to think my writing sucks. But do at the very least recognize that I work at it.

The NanNoWriMo organizers, on the other hand, specifically urge participants to not work at improving their drafts. The NaNoWriMo Web site is chockfull of admonishments like "the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality (caps in original)." What. The. F.?

Truman Capote delivered what I consider to be the world's greatest literally insult by observing that Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which Kerouac lied about having originally written on a single, continuous scroll of paper without revisions, was "not writing; that's typewriting." Keouac, if he had actually written his autobiographical travelogue in a stream of consciousness, would have carried off a stunt. He would not have created literature.

Merely putting words on paper or on computer screens is a physical, not an artistic, act. By actively encouraging aspiring writers to ignore this distinction and pretend that the task is the payoff, the NaNoWriMo organizers are perpetuating a great evil.

I feel much the same about novel writing that I do about marathon writing. If a person is given enough time and not judged on any result other than crossing the finish line, anyone can do either. Running a marathon in under two and a half hours or writing something anyone would want to read, however, requires correcting many, many missteps.

Blog on Break

The blog will desist until the flogging commences. Or something that means I'll be suspending my dropping of the science until my schedule normalizes. That will be next Monday.

Faced with the Bob Segerian dilemma of deadlines and commitments, what to leave in, what to leave out, I determined that the blog was the thing that had to give. Just to give you an idea of the kind of week this has been and will continue to be, even though I'll be traveling to and through points north this weekend, I will still have to find time to crank out an article for a client before start of business Monday. I'm not complaining. I'm just saying this is no way to be working as my own boss.

I will make that deadline, though. I'm hot like that.

Apropos of something: Go Navy! Beat Army!

Be sure to tune in next week to read about how I utterly failed to hit the not NaNoWriMo target of 50,000 words blogged in the month of November and how that was really the point of my word counting all along. Plus, all The Call all the time!

The Walls at Least Moved a Little Farther Outward

Album: The Call, Modern Romans, 1983

Acquired: I probably bought this at the Navy Exchange at Little Creek, but I wouldn't swear to that. I do know that Modern Romans is one of the first cassettes I purchased in 1983.

Best Track: "Time of Your Life"

Lasting Memory: Much like I can't remember the details of purchasing this album, I can't point to a single indelible moment I associate with it. Modern Romans, for me, has just always sort of been there. Except when it wasn't.

[WARNING: The following paragraphs contain high levels of unverifiable pseudofacts and unpopular opinions. Proceed at your own risk.]

Back in 1983, rock radio was still essentially AOR -- album-oriented radio. Microformats and supertight playlists hadn't pablumized and pigeonholed popular music yet, and disk jockeys could play pretty much what they wanted. There were boundaries, of course. But those boundaries were pretty wide. Today's classic rock stations reflect this to some degree. For instance, what exactly do Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart" and Van Halen's "Panama" have in common besides both being big rock hits in the early 1980s that are still played on your very own hometown's station that never forgets.

That programmatic freedom kept the airwaves open to bands like The Call, which if it would be unfair to call them odd, it would certainly be correct to describe them as something completely different. The best I can do by way of describing The Call's sound in three words or less is "gothic country gospel." I had never heard anything like it when WNOR-FM99 started spinning The Call's "The Walls Came Down" during that summer between seventh and eighth grade. And the video playing on MTV, which like the radio of the time took a much more catholic approach to its playlist, was way cool like the first Apple computer ad. (This ain't the original.)

Modern Romans opened up whole new musical worlds for me. Still, as unique as The Call sounded to me then, and still sounds to me now, the album is as much a product of 1983 as George Brett's pine tar incident and Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech. Betrayed innocence and deep paranoia are given equal play on The Call's major-label debut, and those were just the right notes to hit at a time when we could all be scandalized by the amount of stick 'um a baseball player used even as we expected the missiles to launch in 15 minutes.

There is one bit of sanctuary to be found on Modern Romans, however. In the closing track, "All About You," Michael Been sings, in clenched-throat scream that might be the sound a man makes just before the guillotine blade hits, "I've never been to wild about politics/ But I'm wild about you" and "I've never been easy with strangers/ But I'm easy with you." Sometimes all a paranoiac needs is love.

Love isn't always the answer, though, as the person being upbraided in "Time of Your Life" finds out when he chose both hugs and drugs:

Saw a bad movie
It was the story of my life
Bad direction
Story of my life

Now I can't hide
I can't move
I can't deliver
What you gonna do

You had the time of your life
You had the time of your life
Oh, how you loved the attention
It was the time of your life
You had the time of your life
Oh, how you loved the applause

Waking in a closed room
Feelings that I can't show
Told myself I don't mind
She says she wants the door closed

I look her in the eye
Tell her what I'm thinking
It doesn't seem to matter
The ship is sinking

You had the time of your life
You had the time of your life
Oh, how you loved the attention
It was the time of your life
But now it's time to go home

I saw a bad movie
I think I had my soul touched
He told me that he might call
He told me that he might call

He said come back
Come back, come back home
Living by your own rules
Means living all alone

You had the time of your life
You had the time of your life
Oh how you loved the attention
You had the time of your life
You had the time of your life
Oh, how you loved the attention
It was the time of your life
You had the time of your life
Oh, how you loved the applause

So what you wanna hear?

It really is your call on what to listen to now because I can't find "Time of Your Life" as a download or a sample anywhere. That's a shame. Rewatch the video above.

Up Next: The Call, Reconciled, 1986 (Yep, it's another theme week-ish. Postings made be irregular over the next seven days.)

Word Count to Date: 20,080

Say It's Your Birthday?

It's my birthday, too!

We're gonna have a good time.

November 26 is when all the cool kids get borned. Happinesses to my sisters Peggy and Susan, my nephew Chris, and the unmatchable Mr. Robert Goulet (R.I.P.).

Astrology.com gives this advice to Sagitarians today:

As much as you may want to hurl a drink in their face, try not to let the arrogance of someone else put you in a sour mood. There are way too many knuckleheads in this world to live life any other way. After all, if you let every jerk affect your mood, you would never be able to relax. Lately there have been an unpleasantly high number of negative-minded people around you, but luckily that is all about to change soon. So just Zen them out and focus on the people who add joy to your life.

Tina Turner, born Nov. 26, 1941, has been known to throw a drink or two in her time. Bob would never lose his cool like that, and he enjoyed his beverage to much to waste it. Be a Bob.

Joke for a Sunday

In honor of the Thanksgiving tradition of getting together with family, I'm posting the following tale of a young man's eventful evening at his ancestral home in the hills of western Carolina. This was told to me by Boy Scout Troop 67 Scoutmaster Jeff Irving. In the spirit of campfire story telling, I have changed and expanded upon the original.

===============

Bob Jones always enjoyed returning to the family farm outside of Boone, N.C. He loved the mountain views, the smells of the livestock and mown hay, and the peace and quiet of being so far from his normal life in the metropolis Charlotte had somehow turned into over the thirty years he had lived there since graduating from Appalachian State.

What Bob especially liked about going back home was sitting up late with Uncle Skeet, sipping some 'shine and hearing stories about the old days. Having majored in English, Bob always meant to write those stories down some day, but his job at Wachovia always seemed to prevent him from getting started on that project.

This particular night, though, Bob just happened to have a notepad and pen in hand when Skeet came in from slopping the Thanksgiving dinner leftovers to the hogs. Bob had been jotting down some bullet points for a meeting on Monday, but he had manners enough to set his work down and accept the mason jar Skeet offered.

As soon as Skeet settled into his chair in front of the roaring fire, he said, "Hear that wind kicking up boy? Makes me think we're due for the first real snow. Also reminds me of another Thanksgiving night in this very house back in, musta been right after the war -- 1946, yeah." Bob knew that Skeet never used the proper name. For his uncle, World War II was always just "the war."

So Bob sunk back in his own overstuffed recliner and prepared to hear about his own father, who had been seriously wounded when fighting through the hedgerows of Normandy alongside Skeet, finally returning home from the soldier's hospital in Washington, D.C., after two years of rehab.

Instead, Skeet started talking about the basement of the farm house. "See that door there, son?" Skeet asked Bob.

"Sure," Bob replied. "That goes down to the old root cellar, right? But I don't know that I've ever seen anybody open it. I know the door's been bolted as long as I can remember, and I was threatened with death itself if I ever tried to open it."

Skeet nodded slowly and then said in a voice almost too low for Bob to hear, "Well, death was the right kinda threat." Before Bob could even ask what that meant, Skeet continued in a louder voice: "That ain't no root cellar, boy. That's the old family crypt. Back when the Joneses first settled this land, the parts that weren't forests was rock. The little land that could be cleared was used for growing food, so the family dug under the house for burying rather than use up good farm land.

Once the road came through around 1940, we could get into town easier, and we started taking our departed kin to cemetery proper. But I reckon there must be five, six generations of Joneses taking their eternal rest not 20 feet beneath where our feet are right now."

Bob was a little unsettled to learn this particular bit of family history, but he was too educated and too much of a city boy by now to feel too superstitious. He fought back the gasp of shock that he knew Skeet was expecting.

Undeterred, even if a little disappointed, Skeet went on: "I never went down there myself, even when it was open. Crypts ain't no place for children, you know. But when I got back from the war, I figured I'd seen just about every evil man can do to man. I reckoned nothing could scare me, and I was naturally curious about what was down through that door.

So after filling my belly with your gramma's turkey and your grandad's whiskey, I threw that door open and tore down those steps. I didn't get five feet before I heard a 'THUMP!' Stopped me cold. And even though I was still close enough to the door to get the light from the living room, I pulled out my matches and struck one to get a better view.

Your grandad handed through a couple of birch switches, and I lit one of those too. I saw that even though the staricase wasn't that long, it had a landing and a full turn about halfway down. I guess some of those coffins musta run to the heavy side, and the bearers woulda needed a break on the way down.

I also saw and felt how the steps was covered with moss since nobody had been down there in so long. I ain't gonna lie. My heart started beating something fierce, and I almost turned around right then. But I was the young, brave war hero. No way I was gonna run from some bones and old pine boxes when I didn't run from living men with guns."

Bob smiled at this. Skeet had never admitted to being afraid of anything.

"Anyway," Skeet continued, pretending not to notice Bob's grin, "I went down to the landing and heard 'THUMP! THUMP!' just as my first torch burned out. I never struck a match so fast in my life. Swiped that matchstick so quick, I nearly slipped on the moss. Still, I wasn't gonna turn back.

I mad a run down the last of the steps and hit the floor of the crypt on my hands and knees, nose to wood with a coffin lid bearing my name, 'Micheal Carter Jones.' And wouldn't you know, my second torch went out right at that moment."

Despite himself, Bob was at the edge of his seat by now. He also realized that he had been scribbling notes on his pad, completely overwriting his bullet points on the risks of subprime mortgages.

Skeet was up out of his chair by now, mimicking his long-ago movements as best as his 86-year-old body would let him. "I scrambled for my matchbox and felt around for my last birch switch as I heard the thumping start up again right by my ear. 'THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!' I had only one match left, and luckily it struck and caught on my torch.

I couldn't believe what I saw. Damned if that coffin with my name on it wasn't raising up off the ground and coming towards me. The lid opened up, and I swear I saw the fires of Hell itself ready to swallow me whole!

I turned and ran, naturally, but that moss wouldn't let me get far. I fell and turned to see that coffin practically on to of me. I was crawling and cursing, and I lost my torch. Pitch black. THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! Barely keeping one step ahead of that pine box."

Bob was writing as furiously as his uncle was talking.

"I finally made up to the top of the stairs, but somebody had closed it from the outside. I knew for sure I was a goner. No light, and the coffin not but a few inches from me. I reached in my pocket for anything I could find to fight off that box.

I grabbed the only thing I had -- a tin of Barry's Bronchitis Bromides, and I threw it as hard as I could!"

Bob couldn't contain himself any longer. "What happened, Uncle Skeet?!" he practically shouted.

Skeet, calm as could be now, just said, "Wouldn't you know, those pills did stop that old coffin."

===============

Word Count to Date: 19,257

Mr. Tambourine Spaceman Feels Better as a Rock Star

Album: The Byrds, Greatest Hits, 1983 reissue

Acquired: I bought this from a pharmacy located in a shopping center located across the street from my elementary school, St. Pius X School, in 1985. I was in high school by then, but I got my hair cut in a doo-licious flattop at a barber shop a few doors down from the pharmacy across the street from St. Pius. Don't ask me why I remember this bit so vividly, but I distinctly recall finding this tape on the bottom shelf of the impulse purchase rack in front of the register at the pharmacy. It was one of maybe six cassettes for sale. What it was doing in the pharmacy is anyone's guess.

Yes, I get paid by the pointless fact when I submit these blog entries. All that stuff about the pharmacy should even earn me a double bonus. Twice nothing! I'll be a rich man.

Best Track: "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star"

Lasting Memory: I didn't really get into music until my freshman year of high school. Even though Clair played a little guitar and Mom had a few hundred records from her time working at Capitol Records in New York in the early 1960s, the Lamb house wasn't what anyone on VH-1's Behind the Music would call a "musical household." (Nick Lachey? What the ...)

I didn't really understand how people could geek out over music and musicians until I saw other kids my age and a little older than I was doing it. It seems odd to come to this realization just now, but I can honestly say that I became something of a good music fan only because I saw a bunch of my wrestling teammates seeking out and enjoying good music. Bob Villaflor and Dave Harris, in particular, showed me the aural ropes.

Which finally gets me to the lasting memory part. I carried The Byrds Greatest Hits tape with me to school for about two weeks straight because I was going to trade it with Bob for his The Smith's Meat Is Murder record. Bob never brought in his record, so I still have my Byrds cassette. I wonder how different my life would have turned out if I had begun listening to The Smiths when I was 14 instead of when I was 22 or so. Would I have worn a pompadour instead of a flattop? Would I have stayed thin? Would I have tried to find a girlfriend in coma?

Only the me in the alternate reality where Bob made good on his end of the album swap knows.

But you all know The Byrds, so I won't belabor or rehash any analysis about how seminal Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, Chris Hillman, Gram Parsons, and the other rotating members of the band were in folk, country, and hyphenated rock subgenres. Instead, for the curious, I'll post links to The Byrds' biographies on the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame and the Rolling Stone Web sites. The differences are telling in that the Hall goes out of its way to portray the group in a positive light, while the magazine goes a past showing the band's warts to making you smell the pus. I say don't hide history, but at the same time, just enjoy the songs and let people handle their own drama.

One thing I think both band bios should have done is fully draw The Byrds' family tree, of which one branch of would look something like Byrds --> Buffalo Springfield --> Crosby, Still, & Nash (and sometimes Young) --> Neil Young and Crazy Horse --> Pearl Jam. Another branch would look like Byrds -- > Flying Burrito Brothers --> Emmylou Harris --> Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder --> Ricky Skaggs and Allison Krauss.

A family tree like that would be fascinating. Feel free to make one and show it to me.

Listen to a clip from "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star

Up Next: The Call, Modern Romans, 1983

Word Count to Date: 17,957

P.S. Virginia Tech 33 UVA 21