The Beatles - Yellow Submarine

I promise you this; you will never ride in a car with me and let a Beatles song come on the radio where I don’t explain their significance in my musical education. I will nearly always explain the same things: The Beatles taught me to sing. I am completely incapable of hearing or singing along with any Beatles song and not singing the harmony. The Beatles explained the execution of harmony before I even understood what it meant. Then, if you’re really lucky and I’m feeling chatty, I may go into the story of my childhood Saturday mornings with you.

My dad is a total Technophile. Or, he mostly was, now he’s just a slow-paced retiree with a golf addiction (we still love him) but he still has that 80s-esque yuppie compulsion to have the newest gadgets. I can remember when the first VCR came into our house. It was one of those gigantic ancient bad boys that was the size of a small coffee table. This was also back in the day before the production companies had released the licensing on cassettes, so very few places actually *sold* VCR tapes, only rented them. Of which, until I was older there was only one place that actually rented them; it was called Video1 in South Hills Mall; I think its part of a bridal shop now. But the point is, back when tapes were still scarce, they were purchasable, but viciously expensive; $80? $75? … a lot. Dad bought a few. I remember kinda feeling like hot shit because not only did my family have a VCR but we actually had TAPES. Dad bought the most random things… Patton, first of all (his favorite movie), Teen Wolf (what? Why?) And Yellow Submarine. Also Tommy got in there somehow at some point. Of course. (Reminder to self to write a post about Tommy.)

I was raised on the musical. My dad, in addition to being a Motown junky and a classic rock aficionado, was also inexplicably very into musicals… this is one of those million reasons why I always joke that my dad is gay. (Ps my dad is actually the antithesis of gay; he just has very funny things like this about him that I love to pick on him for.) (Ps again – I don’t know how I just made this connection, but this fact about my dad is most likely the predominate reason why I went to college for Musical Theater Performance. Durr.) So there was a big portion of the record collection I gleaned from my dad that was Rogers and Hammerstein and Andrew Lloyd Webber stocked. I listened to Jesus Christ Superstar and Tommy more than just about any other records in that collection. I’m not even sure if you would consider Yellow Submarine a musical (I would) or just a really long music video.

Of the vinyl I inadvertently hoarded away from my dad, there are 2 albums I am most emotionally connected to. The red and blue albums. The “best of”s I suppose. I used to sit in the floor turning those albums over and over again, watching the boys age before my eyes. Dad had sat down and recorded most of his vinyl, these albums included, onto cassette tape, and these tapes were probably played more on those Saturday mornings that any other one thing. My brother and I would ride around with Pop on these Saturdays singing our hearts out and I felt in my soul that harmonizing was the right thing to do; no one explained to me how or why to do it. (This was my Mozart playing thirds moment, I suppose?) It is impossible for me to listen to any Beatles song without singing the harmony. I joke that the Beatles taught me to sing.

I went today to see the new biopic about John Lennon, Nowhere Boy, in the theater. It was pretty spot on and was shot in all the right places. It was basically the telling of John’s childhood/early teens up until Hamburg. (Digression: it really amused me that there were so many people in the audience who didn’t know his story? Growing up with Aunt Mimi and that his mom died after being hit with a car? The gasping horror emitted by the majority of the audience made me kinda roll my eyes a bit… I wanted to be like, “people. Why are you here? Did you not know this shit already? Spoiler alert. Duh.”) As I stated in my facebook status update, I really only got weepy at the end, as the credit rolled there was a slideshow of childhood pictures, leading up the Quarrymen, which included babyfaced pictures of Paul and George. (I will have no hesitation telling you George is my favorite Beatle. Inside and out, I love that man on an atmospheric level. Missed forever… xoxo) so yeah, I forget that people don’t get as ‘involved’ with their favorite artists; needing to know entire biographies and meanings to certain songs. Also, having spent such a significant amount of time in Liverpool (story for later?) It was really cool to relive these places that I saw in the film again.

I have struggled off and on with my dedication/admiration of John Lennon. Yes, there are a bazillion reasons to love him, but there are those 2 or 3 little things that he did in his life that make me snarl a little. This movie helped humanize a little more of those things that bugged the crap of me about him, so that’s good. Also the boy playing him in the movie was so balistically hot, especially towards the end with those big ole black frame glasses and pea coat (so much how I like my men. [Plus beard. Obvs.])

This blog post has inadvertently become every discussion about the Beatles my brother and I have ever had. Of which there have been infinite. If my brother was guest blogging he would then have a terrible opinion about his favorite album/song and then I would force him for the bajillionth time to listen to the b-side of Abbey Road (you cannot deny it. None of you. Don’t make me make you listen.) Brother would then tell me for 200th time that he can never really tell which Beatle is singing and he would have to be dead to me for a while.

There is a new multimedia experience I am trying to add to this whole blog situation. I made a terrible quality video of me singing. Mostly this is to give you insight to my all day/everyday. Yeah, I know it’s dumb to drive around with headphones, but I just can’t get it loud enough without. I cannot listen to a song I know without singing alone. Especially in the car. I am a car singer extraordinaire.

My favorite part of this video at the end is when I am talking to another driver who is making poor decisions. Lol at the constant turn signal noise. I crack myself up. Enjoy.

Major Lance - Um Um Um Um Um Um

I have several families. My nuclear; my mom, dad, brother, niece and I. (we are the only ones of us around for hours in any direction.) My extended; the ones sprinkled through Mount Airy and Galax - my aunts, uncles, cousins and remaining grandparents. The hyper-extended; the few floaters in Detroit, Virginia, SC and even Germany. Then the surrogate families… since my brother and I grew up so “far away” from our other kin, we were adopted into a few other groups, we were raised by villages… 1) Our church and 2) my dad’s coworker world. This song makes me think of #2 (although my church family is a huge part of who I am, even though I no longer associate myself with this church – a post for another time, I’m already mentally preparing for it).

The 80s in Raleigh was a much different place than it is now. I grew up off Lake Wheeler road, (an area eaten alive with subdivisions and strip malls now,) but the house my father built, at the end of the cul-de-sac still remains. I find myself sometimes driving by, it’s not too far from my home now… about halfway between where I live inside the beltline and my parents’ home in Apex. Driving down that little unlined back road beneath the loblolly pines and puttering past the split level ranch homes of that neighborhood really does something to me. I time travel every time. I am kissing a boy for the first time, (Chris) after he pops a wheelie off a plank of plywood propped on a cinderblock in his back yard. I am learning to ride my bike, albeit pathetically, while the whole neighborhood watches me crash. I hear pine needles crunching beneath my Zips. I smell dogwoods and lumber while my dad builds the freestanding garage... But one of the strongest memories I have of that house are the block parties.

Does anyone even have block parties anymore? Does penny candy still exist? I can understand that my niece may never know what a VHS tape or a rotary phone is; I got that. But trick or treating without fear? Banana seat bicycles and realistic toy guns without the orange cap in them? (My God, did you ever think they would stop selling Jell-o Pudding Pops? They did! They are gone! You will never eat another REAL Jell-o Pudding Pop!) Wandering off deep into the woods to explore for hours with the promise to be home by dark and never explaining where you’ve been… can kids even do that now? That was the majority of me and my brother’s “play time” as kids… just… walking off into the woods... Exploring. We would walk for miles up into strangers’ back yards and then just… wander back. Stick fighting; jumping creeks… are there even any creeks left in the 27606? Lake Wheeler is 1/3 the size it was when I was a kid. We didn’t have shows the glorified teen pregnancy much less even understand the concept of reality TV… we watched The Dukes of Hazzard and the Muppet Show and we went to bed.

My dad began working for this company almost 40 years ago. Rather than go into his entire history of employment, I will tell you he worked his way up through college, starting as a surveyor and ending up in upper management when he finally retired a few months ago. My dad got me my current job, where I worked 2 stories below him for the past 6 years, with him and the extended family I grew up with. I loved working with my dad and these guys. I wish he was still here. Dad basically created the department he later became responsible for. The men who created this section with him worked with him (some are still here) from day one. These men (and women) became my dad’s best friends and one of my surrogate families. They would always throw Christmas parties together, we kids all graduated kind-of around the same time (I was younger than most,) and we all played together. One of the best parties the group would throw, and the ones that stick out the most are the annual pig-pickins.

Please remember, this is going back a lot of years for me, so while my details may not be 100% accurate, the feelings of these memories are flawless. The smell of the pig cooking, the crispness of the fall air as they day would come to a close… Chocolate Chess Pie, my mother’s laughter, vinegar, my dad in flannel with a big full red beard, my second dads; Jim and Scotty teasing me and encouraging my shenanigans, showoffs and general attention seeking behaviour; and the music. Always the music. Dad would pull out his full Kenwood stereo and set up the vinyl. Mostly Carolina Beach music, Motown and a little classic rock thrown in. I sometimes wonder who has listened to my dad’s vinyl more now… me or him. How many times can a child listen to Steppenwolf’s ‘68 self titled first album and be normal? Is it ‘normal’ for an 8 year old girl to know all the words to The Pusher? (ps - in case it is not blazingly apparent... i was perhaps the coolest kid ever.) Dad would test me, play “name that tune” to entertain his friends. I’ve mentioned it before, when my parents would punish me, they wouldn’t send me to my room or ground me, they would take away my music… Hell. On. Earth.

There is very little Shag music I can hear now-a-days and not think of these pig pickins. Where I don’t think of that little ranch house and the smell of the pig cooking and the taste of the sweet iced tea. I hope I can give my own non-existent children experiences like this one day. Or, at least my niece. These songs, Major Lance, the Temptations, Wilson Pickett, the Drifters, the Coasters, the Platters, and the Four Tops – these songs are the ones that bring me back with the strongest intensity to the innocence and childhood euphoria of Swiftbrook Circle. Much like Hank Williams, Sr and roy are the strongest connection to my mom for me; This music, the deep swinging soul of the Southern black man, this will always bring me back to my daddy.



FYI – my dad is the whitest man on earth. My family feeds on irony, whether they recognize it or not.

Elton John & Kiki Dee - Don't Go Breaking My Heart

“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.” - John Lennon



An over-active imagination for a child can be either a blessing or a curse. If a child was to never learn to control this imagination, to distinguish reality from the fantasy land in their heads - this would be a curse; this would be me. When the fantasy that a person makes up in their own mind becomes literally painful to let go of, this is bad. most kids learn how to let this go. I held on voraciously. It is one of the things I like most and least about myself. when I think of where it all started, this black and white perception of reality that I seem to have, my all or nothing personality, I have no one but Elton John to blame.

To explain:

Growing up in the little ranch house near Lake Wheeler, It was me and my brother surrounded by kids I had trouble connecting with because I couldn’t play regular kid games. I wanted to play “house” or “stories”, wherein I would create some elaborate set-up, epic love story or something involving shipwrecks or space shuttle launches. When my friends would get tired of me being so bossy and trying to direct the action of the story, they all wandered off to climb trees or ride bikes and I retreated back inside to my real friends; my 7” vinyl collection and fisher price portable turntable.

I don’t remember who bought all these vinyls for me, if I adopted them or they were picked up at flea markets, they were just there. I do remember buying a few with my allowance, but the rest of these singles, of which there were and still are stacks of them, I hoarded and multiplied. Titles I would have never thought to have picked out for myself but played over and over again because I could control them. Eddie Rabbit’s “I Love a Rainy Night” and The Beatles “Revolution” are a couple of the ones I remember playing the most.

I remember sitting on the floor of my living room with my headphones on, listening intently with my hand on the dial of the receiver of that huge Kenwood stereo my dad had back then. I couldn’t have been more than 5 or 6, so this is 1982-ish. I can very clearly remember formulating this theory that seemed completely rational to me at the time, which was that for every song on the radio, the Band or Musician had to be in the studio set up and ready to play each song. For the same song to play on two different stations meant the band had to move very fast and hopefully the radio stations weren’t very far away from each other. This is why musicians were paid so much for what they did and had such big fancy houses like Graceland; so much work! This is when a child’s overactive imagination is a blessing because it’s adorable to look back and laugh at myself for this.

Around this same time, I very vividly remember dragging the portable turntable into my brother’s room and playing Elton John and Kiki Dee’s “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” on 7” vinyl over and over; dancing/spinning in circles. (I had a constant habit of spinning in circles to music as a kid. This lasted way into my early teens. I apparently was a whirling dervish in my past life.) I very suddenly had a very vivid realization of the true meaning of the song… The man was singing, quite literally about his heart breaking. This singer was having a heart attack. This somehow translated into some sort of Frankenstein situation whereupon the Man singings’ heart has been broken and the woman sings “I’ll give you my heart” and therefore some sort of post-modern promethean heart transplant takes place. I then spent the remainder of the afternoon staging and perfecting the stage production or perhaps music video of this song, acting out both parts on my own. I can’t tell you how many times I picked up and dropped that needle that day. I played both the donor and the donee, there was dancing, props, the works. I can still quite literally remember dance moves to certain parts of this song. This was the first time I ever did this to a song. Now this all I do to songs. Damn your lyrical prowess, Bernie Taupin!

Here is the curse of the overactive imagination. One would assume as a child, such daydreams with any activity, musical or otherwise, are normal or encouraged. However, it became a type of compulsion and expectation for me that remains to this day. My favorite songs all have choreography or a story/music video in my head. The best songs are the ones that have me starring as the lead singer, perhaps on stage. This entitlement I seem to have to these songs, the trigger in my head that won’t allow me to listen to a really good song without spacing out and creating the story in my head that best fits it, causes me to sometimes become what others would perceive as abnormally attached to certain songs. Or even certain bands. There are songs that border on absolute obsession for me because the story is so emotionally and personally strong in my mind that I have laid claim to them.

My overactive imagination married me to this ideal of only songs that are worthy of a story are worthy of a place in my heart. There are many, many songs with many, many stories. Some of them are true, some of them are what I wish were true. I created this blog to keep up with the true ones. The rest are stored in reserve on my external hard drive and in my noodle.

This is the song that started it all. Thank Elton.

Michael Jackson - Billie Jean

created: Friday, May 29, 2009, 11:36:39 AM
modified: June 26, 2009, 2:30:24 PM

This is going to be a round-about way to get my point across here, but try to keep up.

When trying to think through how I was going to start this off, this was my actual thought process:

- I love Michael Jackson, I don’t care who knows it.
- Why would anyone condemn an artist for his personal life when his music is so amazingly funky?
- It’s not personal, it’s business. Meaning, I don’t care what he does on his own time, as long as ‘PYT’ and ‘Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough’ remain on permanent rotation on my iPod.
- That makes me think of “You’ve Got Mail” which was; let’s admit it, a precious movie.
- I don’t want people to think I got my “it’s not personal, it’s business” philosophy from a movie, but it will help to add perspective to the situation.
- I think MJ is a strange person, but I don’t think he is a criminal. Regardless of my vague opinion of his personal life, I will always love him because he is the funkiest human being in the universe.
- I have more memories associated with Michael Jackson than most any other artist, because Thriller came out when I first started obsessing over music.

This last point segue into my original reasoning for choosing Billy Jean as the maidenhead MJ post, they may be more, or I may be able to fit it all in this post, in a roundabout way.

In 1983, MJ released thriller. We were kids; we were obsessed with it, like most everyone in the country at that time. I was in either Kindergarten or first grade at the time. This album was the first of many that I took with me Show and Tell. I brought the vinyl in to show the class the amazing photograph of Jackson lying on his side, clutching the baby Bengal tiger. But mostly I wanted to show off how awesome I was for having this new and exciting release. (This was then followed by Showing and Telling of Cyndi Lauper’s “She’s So Unusual” and The Police’s “Synchronicity”.)

Shortly after I showed off the album (or either it was soon before?) was the Motown 25 special wherein MJ dazzled the universe with His Moonwalk. The next day, we kids were in a frenzy. The entire day was spent talking about sparkly gloves and falling over ourselves in an attempt to recreate this magic backward-ness.
……………
This is where I stop and pause. I have a tendency to start a post for this blog and then stop for a couple days to make sure I am remembering everything I mean to say about a particular song. In this instance, I started this post a little less than a week ago. Last night, we lost our king. I am so bewildered and so unbelievably sad about this tragedy. At this point, no one knows the circumstances surrounding his death, and I doubt I will be deterred by whatever the reasons may be, controversial or not.

Yesterday, I sat with a table of friends, all about the same age as me, some up to 5 years younger and 4 years older than me. We were all, technically, children of the eighties, why was I the only one who was so obviously upset by this? I was watching the streaming report on cnn.com when the coroner made his official announcement that he was gone. I began to cry. Everyone looked at me like I was a special needs kid. I didn’t really care too much about that. I called my one true friend who knew how upset I was and knew exactly why. I tried, very calmly, to explain to my boyfriend why I was upset. This is the paraphrasing of why. These are the things my best friend already knows. This is why I love her.

I started to explain this a few paragraphs up… and the whole purpose of this blog in general should explain, that I was a child who was greatly influenced by music. My entire life has been a “musical journey”. I have a passion. I may not be a musician myself, other than playing a few instruments for personal pleasure, and I may not be a painter or a photographer, or an artist in a traditional sense, but I consider myself a person who takes great pleasure from the aesthetics of life. The main cynosure of my pleasure receptors for the appreciation and obsession of the arts is primarily focused on music. I find the greatest pleasures, pains, passions, experiences, loves, hates, and most significant moments of my life have been a great soundtrack composed by the men and women who created these masterpieces just for me. My heart is in this goofy little blog. My heart is in the songs. My heart is with the artists.

There is the simple beginning. My father was a music nut. We played records, rather than watched Saturday cartoons. Dad would quiz me on bands like Steppenwolf and the Four Tops to amuse his buddies when I was 4 or so. Dad was the one who let a 7 year old me stay up to watch the first ever MTV awards until 11pm. It was dad who helped me buy my first ever vinyl, Thriller, and dad who bought me my first ever CD, Dangerous. I grew up with Michael Jackson. In a long line of musical passionate responses, my first realization that music was more than just a “thing”, was the way my body, my toes responded to Billie Jean. I never forgot that, and I never forgot him. I was never not a Michael Jackson fan. Even through all his personal drama, I always knew his music would never let me down.

I can remember when Thriller (the video for the song) first came out, and the special about its making, came on MTV and how it played all day long. I can remember when the same thing happened for Black or White. I can remember so many performances, so many videos, so many songs I knew as well as myself. So many funky, just technically perfect pop songs. So many people overlook the beauty of pop music. How a good, happy song, just for the sake of hearing a good song that makes your head bob, changes your mood. This all round-abouts into my (and Oscar Wilde’s) argument about art for art’s sake. Just because a song isn’t profound, heartbreaking, life-changing, doesn’t mean it’s not a good song. Some songs are just awesome because they are awesome. This was Michael Jackson’s music for me. He was an amazing artist and performer, and his music was great.

I am sad because so many people forgot this and it took his death for the american media remember that they loved him. So many people forgot how amazing he was and let the media destroy him. I can’t imagine the hell his personal life has been for the past few years. I pray he is at peace.