AAH’s Top 5 for July: Associations

I guess I’m feeling inspired.

It’s another music Top 5, from my iPod Shuffle. It’s more of the stuff that moves me the best when I run, ride and lift.

But there’s an angle this time: This is the association edition. Each of these songs conjures a specific time and place for me.

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1. Icarus (Born on Wings of Steel), Kansas (Masque, 1975)
http://www.kansasband.com/

It’s the summer of 1976. I am moving in and out of the garage carrying boxes labeled “kitchen” and “Mike and Ty Bedroom” and “Bathroom” and “Books” to our utility trailer. We are moving to a new neighborhood, far to the north and away from every place I have known since Library School in West Terre Haute (the year before Kindergarten).

There is a radio sitting on top of the freezer, which sits hulking next to the door leading into the house. The antenna is angled just right to pickup WPFR through all the metallic clutter of shovels and rakes and other signal competition deep in the garage. Born on Wings of Steel is playing.

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Recommendation: Get the studio version. Check out a sample at iTunes here.

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(And “thank you” to my several friends with whom I attended Library School who read this blog. It is kind and quite mercenary of you.)

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2. Where the Streets Have No Name, U2 (The Joshua Tree, 1987)
http://www.u2.com/

It’s May of 1987. I am driving downtown San Francisco with my friend Diana who has traveled with me as I am about to begin flight school with the Air Force. We are a week or so early so I have time to get settled in before my classes start at Mather Air Force Base in Rancho Cordova and we have time to sight see.

It’s pretty crowded in the streets that day – a demonstration parade of several sorts is making its way through the city center. The first bunch we see is a gay pride thing – all the rainbow flags and banners and what I guess you’d call party costumes and such.

Then it morphs into a “Free El Salvador” thing, with more banners, except partly in Spanish and something about fascists and dictators and “Get Out Of Our Country” (I don’t quite get who is in who’s country, I can just tell somebody’s unhappy and very loud about it.) Then it morphs again as it continues to move along – Panama, Cambodia, Vegetarian’s rights, some more gay rights, and something about the UN being evil. How’d they get in there?

Anyway, we arrive in front of a hotel and we see a couple of limousines parked in the street directly in front of the entrance canopy. All traffic is stopped now because the light is red, but also because there’s a big stir – the limos are blocking the street. Security guys are out and opening car doors and standing there, looking around. Then heads pop up and start moving toward the hotel lobby.

It’s Bono and The Edge and Larry and Adam, right there next to us.

They on the other side of the cars from us, but we get a clear view of them. It lasts long enough – somehow – for me to get ahold of my camera and shoot a picture of them. Or somebody, one of them, maybe a couple of them.

(I can’t say for sure anymore because later, I gave the photo to the guy at the video store near my apartment because he said he liked U2, and now I can’t find the negatives.)

Anyway, we are thrilled and feel like we accidentally stepped into a little piece of transient history.

(Oh, sorry – Jim’s camera. Thanks, Jim. I did give that back to you, like, ten years later, didn’t I?)

I hear that song and I am right there. Thanks, Diana. That was fun.

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Here’s the video that got it all started: http://youtu.be/QQxl9EI9YBg

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3. Cuttin’ Heads, Peaceful World, and Worn Out Nervous Condition, John Mellencamp (Cuttin’ Heads, 2001)
http://www.mellencamp.com/

I am running along a rough, pot-holed asphalt county road east of my parent’s farm.

It’s a trip home, an all-too-rare visit, this time by myself. As I run I smell the alfalfa hay, recently cut in the field to my right, and the dull, musky, scent of decay in the mud in the ditch between us. I cannot hear the bees and cicadas that must surely be making their sounds – I have earphones in. Taking it all in.

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Last.fm has the full album:
http://www.last.fm/music/John+Mellencamp/Cuttin’+Heads?ac=Cuttin’ Heads

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These songs are great, and to listen to them in this atmosphere . . . well, I guess I am sentimental.

While they are not the highest energy-run fast songs you might think are needed for a vigorous workout, they are, well . . . inspiring, introspective, and honest. And they’re home – at least to me. It seems very good to me.

Mellencamp is right at ten years older than me; roughly the same age as my oldest cousin from Seymour – also Mellencamp’s hometown. So the idea is that they – John and Cousin Richard – graduated from Seymour High School together. Well, the truth is I have no idea. I like the idea, but it’s probably way off.

The better thing is that my son, Jace likes to call me “Poppi.” We listen to the title song together once-in-a-while, and early on, because the “N” word is used (in a proper context) I was sure to talk with him about racism and the good message Mellecamp presents. The result is that we hate racism and we love the song.

Insert shameless plug here:
My folk’s home and the road I mention are near the original Green Acres Dairy Bar, Where The Buffalo Roam. (Actually, used to roam. The buffalo were removed a few years ago, although last I knew, they still sold a buffalo burger.)

And to sit in the parking lot of Green Acres and have a burger and ice cream and listen to this or any other mandatory Mellencamp, head north out of Terre Haute to Sandcut on the “Rosedale Road”, a couple miles east of and parallel to Old US 41. From Brazil, go north on State Road 59 to the Rio Grande Road (W County Road 1220 N) and head west to Sandcut, then south.

Can’t miss it. If you do, just call them: (812) 466-3711.

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4. Zoo Station, U2 (Achtung Baby, 1991)
http://achtungbaby.u2.com/

It’s April 1992. I am sitting alone in a luxurious car on the ICE, racing north, from Frankfurt to Hamburg. Golden fields of blooming canola are blurring past my massive window. I have a cheap pair of headphones on and I’m playing a cheap cassette tape player listening to U2.

Germany and its beautiful rural scenery, U2, this giant window; it’s like my own private music video. There is something exhilarating and freeing – exotic – to be here in Europe and doing this solo, but still I feel an intense desire – a wish – to be with, to share it with someone.

I have been to my cousin’s wedding in Portugal, spent a few days in Oberursel with my adopted German grandmother – Oma, Erica, or as I have always known her – Mutti. Now I am going to see my friend Julia, a student at the University of Oldenburg and will finish my trip in Amsterdam.

After being amazed by the Vermeer’s and Rembrandt’s of the Rijksmuseum and having dinner with a Michigan businessman, I reluctantly head back to my hotel room. I turn on the television to watch a U2 concert in Berlin, and have to force myself to turn it off after an hour because I have an early flight to New York.

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Check it out at Last.fm: http://www.last.fm/music/U2/Achtung+Baby

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5. Don’t Misunderstand Me, Rossington Collins Band (Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere, 1980)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rossington_Collins_Band

Summer 1979. We’ve just officially become seniors and Karl and I are driving all over West Terre Haute in his white 1969 Triumph TR6 convertible. We’re smoking Swisher Sweets and listening to this hard-hitting, top-down, post-Lynyrd Skynyrd near-rock anthem.

Man, we feel free and light. Our junior year is over. We’ve made it.

The sun is bright and the open cockpit is a swirl in the wind and it’s anywhere we want. So we want DQ on National Avenue, then we want to go to South Lake, which requires a cruise through Toad Hop to get there.

We park on the west side of the white cinderblock building and saunter into the open-air pavilion, across the cold concrete floor, shaded in the basement of the raised building; we’re in a breeze-way of a concession stand full of neatly aligned green wood picnic tables. We move to the counter to order a follow-up to our DQ visit of just ten minutes before.

We each get a huge Coke and keep glancing out, through the open lake-side of the room, to the beach, its coarse gravel pit-quality sand, same as it ever was, just as it was when we were kids. The tall, galvanized slide standing half in and half out of the water is still there, too, as it has always been. And the warm water in its color of weak coffee with a little cream; that too, just as it has always been.

We were searching for our friends – mainly girls; probably strictly girls, come to think of it – who have come to get a tan.

We are searching when we get there, and searching when we finally leave. Jeez, this is good. And summer has only started.

We continue to search through the summer and all the way through our last year of high school and beyond. And life has only started.

Find it at iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/rossington-collins-band/id64790

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BONUS TRACK: Unbreakable, Fireflight (Unbreakable, 2008)
http://fireflightrock.com/music/

No sentimental association here . . . except perhaps, ultimately, for the message within. Remember the Top 5 for June, where I spoke about the about the idea of “. . . an offer, a possible future . . . a thing that can set people in motion…”? Yea. These guys are talking about the same thing.

But suppose you’re not interested in that. Ok. Just check out this song, check out the video.

This is the one that will make you move; make you want to move. More energy than that 6-year-old Honey Boo Boo-kid in Texas drinking the Mountain Dew-Red Bull breakfast concoction. Well, maybe not quite that much, but enough.

And as if I really need to tell you – turn it up. A lot.

Check out the video here: http://youtu.be/pWRJAHaOrYg

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Dedicated to my friend, Karl Johnson. Wherever you are, however you are. I love you, Brother.