Month: November 2013

T is for Title songs for pop albums that have no title songs

You Can Dance is the opening phrase of the Madonna song Get Into the Groove and the title of a dance compilation album of her songs.

So I had this bright idea of writing this trial balloon of a post elsewhere and post the completed item here. Ah, but I got no responses to the core question, though I DID think of another, VERY obvious example.

There is this song called Magnet and Steel by a guy named Walter Egan that was a Top 10 song in 1978. I liked it, as it had a certain stroll feeling. Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham, the newish and commercially successful additions to Fleetwood Mac, sing on the chorus, BTW. I bought the album Not Shy, on vinyl – still have it, in fact – and realized that Magnet & Steel served as a quasi-title song for the album. The line in the chorus, “With you, I’m not shy,” is sung several times.

This got me wondering: what other songs functionally serve as the title song, but are not the actual title of the album? That is, the title of the album appears in the lyric of the song? Note: only the first batch has links to the songs.

Brain Damage by Pink Floyd from Dark Side of the Moon, possibly the most famous.
Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana from Nevermind, the obvious choice I didn’t think of until much later.
Sunny Came Home by Shawn Colvin from A Few Small Repairs.
Washington Bullets by the Clash from Sandinista!
I’m Lucky by Joan Armatrading from Walk Under Ladders.
Alison by Elvis Costello from My Aim Is True.
You Learn by Alanis Morissette from Jagged Little Pill.
Down on the Corner by Creedence Clearwater Revival from Willy and the Poor Boys.
Scarborough Fair by Simon & Garfunkel from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme.
One I just discovered: Great Spirit by Robert Plant from the Fate of Nations album. Here are some of the lyrics:
I love my brother, I must share the seed
That falls through fortune at my feet
The Fate of Nations and of all their need
Lies trapped inside of these hearts of greed
That Day Is Done by Paul McCartney from Flowers in the Dirt:
“She Sprinkles Flowers In The Dirt
That’s When A Thrill Becomes A Hurt,
I Know I’ll Never See Her Face.
She Walks Away From My Resting Place.”
Close enough: Fine Line by Paul McCartney contains a line about “chaos and creation”, though the album is Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.

The naming of live albums falls into this category:
Karn Evil 9 by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer from Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends.
I Don’t Want to Go Home by Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes from Reach Up and Touch the Sky.

At least two Paul Simon greatest hits so titled (or subtitled):
Graceland on Shining Like A National Guitar
Train in the Distance from Negotiations and Love Songs

Similarly, You Can Dance is the opening phrase of the Madonna song Get Into the Groove and the title of a dance compilation album of her songs.

This is what I’d like to know: can you think of any others? The live album Steal Your Face by Grateful Dead is named after the song He’s Gone, but that song does not appear on the album, so that wouldn’t count.
***
Ken Jennings is wondering “what the greatest trio of back-to-back-to-back album tracks in pop history might be. Some other candidates that leaped to mind…”

“Where the Streets Have No Name,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and “With or Without You” from U2′s The Joshua Tree
“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “With a Little Help from My Friends,” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” from the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper
“Ziggy Stardust,” “Suffragette City,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” from David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
“Glory Days,” “Dancing in the Dark,” and “My Hometown” from Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A.


ABC Wednesday – Round 13

Ticking people off

I don’t know what I said or did to provoke this response.

My old blogging buddy Greg – he’s not that old, actually, but is one of the first bloggers I actually followed – wrote on his Facebook page a while back: “Have you ever ticked someone off, and you know you ticked them off, but you’re not sure how? If you’re not really good friends with them, you can’t really ask them, and they don’t say what happened, and it’s weirdly frustrating. Recently, it’s happened twice to me … It doesn’t really affect my life too much, but it’s just annoying because I do try to not tick people off. Has this ever happened to you?”

OK, he didn’t actually write “tick” but close enough. And yes, one DOES want to be self-aware.

Yeah, it’s happened at least a few times. Once was when I was playing intermural volleyball at the Y in the early 1990s, and this particular woman, who previously had been reasonably pleasant to me, suddenly became really hostile to me, and I don’t know why. I don’t know what I said or did to provoke this response. Other people, both male and female, seemed to still like me. And since she never actually SAID anything to which I could address, it just went on for a few months, then the session was over, and that was that.

There was this young woman in the 1975 production of Godspell who became really nasty to me. At least, in this case, I THINK it was because she didn’t think I was very good. And on my solo, she may have been right. For some obscure reason, the director switched my piece from “We Beseech Thee” to “All Good Gifts”, from something in my vocal range to something that stretched it greatly. I do recall a rehearsal for a group song “You Are The Light of the World,” for which she had the second verse lead. The entrance is earlier than the first verse, and she was late on it. Though it was not my job to do so, I said to her, “You were late.” She sneered, “No, I’m not,” but the director noted that in fact, she WAS NOT on time. I never would have taken it upon myself to correct her if she hadn’t already been hostile to me.

I used to be SO good at passive-aggressive…

VIDEO REVIEW: The Sound of Music

Two new songs, I Have Confidence and Something Good, were added to The Sound of Music, written by Rodgers, after Hammerstein died.

One could reasonably make the case for movies one ought to see that came out this century. But there are SO many that I have never seen from the 20th Century that I don’t worry about the current stuff as much as I used to. Somehow, prior to this fall, I had NEVER seen The Sound of Music in its entirety. Oh, I’ve seen scenes, of course, but that’s not nearly the same thing.

It’s odd too because my mother had the LP soundtrack going back to nearly when it was released in 1965. I’ve had the CD of same for at least a decade and a half, and I love it dearly. I have great affection for the Morning Hymn that the nuns sing early on, and it’s in my Top Five movie soundtracks ever, along with West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof.

Still, I had not seen many of the songs in the context of the film. Is there a more stunning opening of a movie than the background of the Alps while Maria (Julie Andrews) sings the title song? I didn’t realize Maria’s outdoor excursion was going to get her in trouble back at the abbey.

I knew somewhat of the clash of child-raising styles between Captain von Trapp (Christopher Plummer), a Naval officer widower with seven children, and the free-spirited new nanny, Maria, but I’d miss many of the particulars, such as the whistle. Do-Re-Mi is shot all over Salzburg, and the extra disc for the 40th anniversary let me know that the city is now a destination for movie buffs, largely for that song.

Of course, Maria and the Captain end up together, but somehow I was totally unaware of the subplot involving the Baroness (Eleanor Parker) that briefly bring Maria back to the abbey. And bringing the movie to the intermission. Yes, it’s included on the disc, and we went to bed at that point to finish the movie it the next night, because it is a LONG film.

The real story of Maria and the Captain was compressed in time, and the escape from Austria after the Nazi appeasement was far easier in real life than in the cinematic version. The real family feels that the Captain in the film was far less flexible than the father they knew.

Other features of the extra disc featured the REAL story of the Von Trapp singers as they settle in Vermont and become an international sensation. It also contains a reunion of the seven then-child actors remembering the goofs they made here and there that ended up in the film, a misstep here, a fall there.

Seeing the movie has given me a greater appreciation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein score, which changed from the Broadway version that Mary Martin and others had commissioned. At least one song was dropped, and two new songs, I Have Confidence and Something Good, were added, written by Rodgers after Hammerstein died.

There’s going to be a LIVE version of the STAGE musical on NBC-TV on December 5. I MUST watch.
***
A Complete Curmudgeon’s Guide To ‘The Sound Of Music’. On the other hand, a study suggests that Singing show tunes helps fight off dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

 

JiFKa: the 50th anniversary of the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy

I watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, in real time.

A few years back, I asked What was the first public trauma – as opposed to a personal trauma, such as a death or divorce in the family – that you recall? And while not my first event, the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, when I was ten years old and didn’t understand what happened next – I was not yet seeped in Presidential succession law – was terrifying. The death itself was already scary enough.

It certainly didn’t help that Miss Oberlik, our fifth-grade teacher, told us the news, LEFT THE ROOM, for some reason, which got us talking among ourselves about the meaning of it all, and then she comes back and SCREAMS at us for not being quiet, like everyone else in the school (who, I suspect, hadn’t been ABANDONED by their teacher). I wondered later if she had gone off to compose herself after dropping that bombshell on us.

Like much of the nation, I was glued to the television that weekend. I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, in real time. Of course, I viewed the funeral, and John-John’s salute of his daddy.

Such a strange time, now that I look back on it. A lot of households I visited, especially after the shootings, had pictures on the walls, and the only ones that weren’t family members were of JFK and Jesus Christ. It was not my grief that I remember; it was the tears, seemingly out of nowhere, of many of the adults around me. And if not tears, then an overwhelming sadness that came like unexpected tidal waves.

The 50 cent piece, starting in 1964, bore Kennedy’s image, which I find, in retrospect, to be an amazing feat, changing coinage so quickly. Idlewild Airport in New York City – famous from the Car 54 Where Are You TV theme – was renamed for the slain leader, as was Cape Canaveral, though the latter was eventually switched back.

In 1964, the Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, generally referred to as the Warren Commission Report was released. It claimed that Oswald was the lone gunman, not involved in a conspiracy; and that the bullet that killed the President also wounded Governor John Connolly of Texas. One of the local newspapers had excerpts of the Warren Commission report, and I not only read them, I clipped them out of the newspaper, and put it in a three-ring binder, something I believe I STILL have somewhere in the attic.

Over the years, there are those who dismissed the report as a coverup, or at least as a lazy effort of accepting the FBI’s analysis as fact, rather than doing an independent investigation. The Oliver Stone movie JFK (1991), which my girlfriend at the time and I referred to as JiFKa, was about New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s belief that there was “more to the Kennedy assassination than the official story.” Conversely, at the end of his novel 11/22/63, Stephen King says he’s over 95% sure Oswald was the lone shooter, though his wife Tabitha believes otherwise.

The one time I got to meet Earl Warren, along with a number of my classmates in the early 1970s, I really wanted to ask the by-then retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court about this topic; instead, I asked him some arcane question about corporations as people, which was an issue back in the 1870s as well as the 21st century.

I still wonder, if only a little, what the whole truth of the matter was.
***
CBSNews.com to stream 1963 broadcast coverage of JFK assassination, and/or one can buy the coverage on Amazon. I think not for me, thank you.

Five quotes from JFK’s 1963 Civil Rights address that still resonate today

How JFK’s Assassination Changed Media and the SIXTIES Generation.

Lee Harvey Was a Friend of Mine by Laura Cantrell [LISTEN]

The good news: my daughter will never become a smoker

Smokers, I hope you take this opportunity to quit smoking today, if not for yourself, then for me. And my daughter.

Today is the Great American Smokeout. Last year, if I recall, I wrote some anti-smoking screed, and someone thought it was terribly mean to smokers (I didn’t think so.)

I decided to write something nice about smokers this year. Well, until my daughter had some particularly bad reactions recently. If someone walks by her with a lit cigarette, she starts hacking uncontrollably. She can control this only a little by holding her breath IF she sees the smoker coming. (From years of living with a smoker, I have learned the ability to block the inside of my nose and breathe through my mouth until the danger passes.)

Her asthma is apparently more severe than mine – she’s missed school this fall because of it. Yes, I recognize that cigarettes are legal, and they are highly addictive and that smokers are an oppressed minority in the US. But I suffer when around even a heavy smoker who isn’t currently smoking, I’ve discovered, and my child suffers even more, so you can guess where my sympathies lie.

So, smokers, I hope you take this opportunity to quit smoking today, if not for yourself, then for me. And my daughter.
***
Do you know what makes me feel ambivalent? Those e-cigarettes. I’ve been around them only a few times, but they do not bother me physically, which is rather astonishing. They may be doing damage to the smoker, who might be getting a false sense of safety, and I AM concerned about that.

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial