Musical Musings, Memories...

I think almost everyone has had the experience of listening to a piece of music that transports you back to some other time, place, and experience.  There are several such pieces that zap my brain like that, and I occasionally discover a new one.  Here are three that get me every time:

Tommy (The Who): Takes me back to 1969, when I was consumed in learning about electronics.  I spent many hours in a disused chicken shack that I'd converted into an electronics workshop, building lots of home-designed projects that occasionally worked.  I couldn't afford to buy parts, so I scavenged them from old vacuum tube radios and televisions that local repair shops (remember them?) gave me.  I played this album repeatedly, on an old Motorola stereo (vacuum tubes and electrodynamic speakers!) that I'd scavenged and repaired...

Kodachrome (Paul Simon): Takes me back to 1973, when I was attending U.S. Navy technical schools in Mare Island (Vallejo), California.  On the weekends I jumped into my old beater of a car and cruised north to Yolo County, between Davis and Dixon, to go skydiving.  I drove through miles and miles of fragrant fields, windows open and hot, humid air pouring in, and this song playing loud on my cassette deck.  Happy times, and this song takes me right back there...

Smoke on the Water (Deep Purple) Takes me back to 1975, when I was a few short miles off the coast of South Vietnam, in the South China Sea, as Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese forces.  The USS Long Beach (which I was stationed on) was part of a task force that was picking up refugees.  We had many ARVN helicopters land on our aft deck, just barely big enough to hold one of the CH-47 Chinooks they were mainly coming out in.  Each time one landed, a large working party (including me!) would push it over the side to make room for the next one.  While we worked, someone had this song playing in a loop, very loud.  It was an eerie scene – frantic refugees (men, women, and children), laden with valuables, running around terrified; multimillion dollar helicopters being tossed over the side like garbage; even more helicopters running out of fuel and landing close alongside (sometimes very close!); and a motley assortment of overloaded boats heading for us.  Every ship in the large task force was experiencing similar things; together we took back over 25,000 refugees to the Phillipines.  A few notes of that song and I'm right back there in that maelstrom...

Ukelele?!?

Unless you are a very strange person, you will never before have heard a ukelele that sounded like this:

Up In My Grill...

Remy at Reason.tv mocks the nanny state:

Japanese Kids Do Swing...

Via my mom:

A Song for the Season...

Mark Steyn on the history of The Battle Hymn of the Republic...

Dancing Granny...

Via Rachel Lucas, this is a slightly different version of a video I've posted before.  But what the hell, it's still wonderful :)

Evolution of Music, a Cappella...

I recognized everything up through the 1970s, and maybe half of the 1980s.  Everything after that was new to me (and didn't make my ears happy!).

When I was a teenager, I was astonished when my parents forbade me from playing Joni Mitchel or Simon & Garfunkel on our family's record player.  It was easier for me to understand why they didn't want to hear Crosby, Stills or Jimi Hendrix.  They must have felt then as I feel today listening to this music of the 2000s...

Swiss Drums...

Drums like you've never seen them before, trust me:

Internet Jukebox...

Via my mom, this delightful site.  Debbie and I spent a happy hour just listening to the songs we remember from our teenage years, and with some amusement to many of the earlier songs that we'd never heard before...

I'm Going to Try for a Fifth Time...

One of the things on my retirement to-do list is to try (for the fifth time) to learn to play a musical interest.  I love to listen to music, and have always envied those who could create it.  Starting when I was quite young I've tried a recorder, a harmonica, a flute, and a guitar.  To call my attempts disastrous would be overly kind.  I never even learned how to read music. 

Now I have (or will have :) the time to devote to this.  Once again I'm looking around to choose an instrument.  Purely accidentally last night I ran into a video of an instrument that I had never seen or heard of before: an ocarina, which comes in many varieties.  As I read about them, they look like a good choice for a beginner – and they sound a lot like one of my favorite of all instruments, the flute.  Here are a couple of videos of ocarina music I ran across (there are many more on YouTube):

A Harmonica at Carnegie Hall...

Via my mom:

More a capella...

I'm discovering that there is an entire (and well-populated!) genre, long-established, of a capella music where voices replace music that would ordinarily be played with instruments.  It's all new to me!  Here's a famous English ensemble: the Swingle Singers, singing Waltzing Matilda:

Zappa on Education...

Frank Zappa was an interesting man, far beyond his music, which is how I first came to know about him.  I still listen to his music frequently.  I think there's a lot of truth in this:

Dogs, Socks...Nothing More...

That's It - the Internet is Finished!

Best Pet Video Evah!

Made for the Raleigh, North Carolina SPCA:



Awesomely awesome!

More Interesting Music...

Passed along by reader Larry E.:

Shenandoah...

Just ran across this beautiful rendition of one of my favorite American folk songs: Shenandoah:

Rolling in the Deep, an a capella Cover...

After seeing my post yesterday, reader Larry E. sent along this video of another similar artist.  Awesome:


More of Mike Tompkin's stuff here...

Geezer a capella...