87 – Sun/C79 – Cat Stevens – 1974

Sun/C79 - Cat Stevens

                When this came out in 1974, on the “Buddha and the Chocolate Box” album, I was working at Accutronics. As I’ve written before, I was going to night school at Elgin Community College and my parents had required that I find a day job. At $2.63 per hour I was hired as the shear operator. The shear operator took 3 ft. x 4 ft. or 3 ft. x 6 ft. sheets of copper clad printed circuit board laminate, heated them under a quartz lamp, and cut them down into 12 in x 15 in (or other custom size) process panels.

                I also had to load and unload 55 gallon drums of waste water and ferric chloride (copper etchant) onto trucks, and unload skids of laminate. At the time, the shear operation had two people, one to heat the laminate and feed it into the shear to a second person who grabbed the laminate and held it against the stop until I stepped on the foot pedal to activate the shear.

                When “Buddha…” came out, it played in its entirety on the Elgin FM station and I taped it and brought it to work. (When side one ended, the station segued seamlessly to the synthesizer noodling from “Dark Side of the Moon”. I didn’t think it sounded like Cat Stevens, knowing little of Pink Floyd at the time. I was surprised when I bought the album and found it didn’t have that music).

                (Speaking of surprises, I have a copy of Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief Album, which is the only 3 sided, 2 sided album in my collection. For the first couple times I played it, I thought I was going nuts. I usually bought an album, and then taped it immediately, playing the tape at work and in my car. But this was weird! When I tried to tape it I found that one side had a whole different set of sketches that I had never heard before, they definitely were not the sketches I heard the first time! It turns out there are two parallel grooves on one side and depending on how you drop the needle, you get one or the other set of sketches. It doesn’t say anything about this on the liner notes.)

                So anyway, Accutronics, being owned by Hammond Organ at the time, had a sample organ in our break room (6 broken office chairs circled around a short garbage can). This organ had one of the newfangled cassette players built into it. I came in with my “Buddha…” bootleg tape and made everyone listen.

                “Hey guys, it’s the new Cat Stevens album!”

                I’m lucky I didn’t end up head down in one of my 55 gallon drums.

86 – Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World – Israel Kamakawiwo’ole – 1993

Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World - Video

                I know this song became somewhat ubiquitous in the early 2000’s, but I like it because it reminds me of the 6’2”, 700+ pound “Iz” who sings it and of the trip Lynnie and I made to Maui before we had kids. (His funeral was attended by 10,000 people , after lying in state in the state capital, only the third person in Hawaiian history given that honor, the first non-government official. In the video, that’s Iz’s ashes being spread on the ocean.)

                We were staying in a condo on the ocean in Maui and it rained the first 2 days we were there. The first day we went down to the beach and sat in a cabana and watched the ocean and the rain.

                The second day we had decided to drive the Road to Hana in our rental car. Lynn wanted to see the seven sacred pools and I wanted to see Charles Lindbergh’s grave (he had been a hero of mine since I had read “We” in junior high).

“…it takes about 2.5 hours to drive when no stops are made as the highway is very winding and narrow and passes over 59 bridges, 46 of which are only one lane wide. There are approximately 620 curves along Route 360 from just east of Kahulu to Hana, virtually all of it through lush, tropical rainforest.” (Wikipedia)

                It took us about 4 hours to make the trip because we had to stop twice to wait for a back loader to come and clear the rubble from the washouts. It wasn’t until we got back to our condo that we found out they were discouraging people from driving on the road due to the heavy rainfall. I guess that explains why we never saw another car until we were on our way back.

                We found the Seven Sacred pools, but it was raining and we got out of the car, took a couple pics, got back in the car, and continued on. Never saw a sign or any indication of Lindbergh’s grave. We drove until the blacktop road ended and the road became a pot hole infested dirt road. Then I turned around and headed back.

                On the way back we stopped at Mama’s Fish House (recommended by Steve Dahl on all his yearly trips to Hawaii in the 80’s and 90’s). It’s a nice restaurant on the North coast of Maui, right on the ocean. Don’t recall what we ate, but don’t remember being disappointed, either.

                The next morning we got up around 4AM to get picked up by a bus and taken to the top of the volcanic crater in Haleakala National Park to see the sunrise and then to bike down to the bottom. Unfortunately, it was snowing at the summit and nothing could be seen.

                “Don’t worry, when we get down a ways, it’ll clear up,” chirped our guide.

                They then handed out rain suits. None my size, 6’5”, 290  lbs. of solid blubber. The one I finally squeezed into made me look and feel like 10 pounds of s—t in a 5 pound bag.

                We then commenced to careen down the volcano side, on wet roads; with my glasses wet and fogged, finding the hand brakes barely slowed my momentum. I stayed at the back of the pack of 15 or so others so I wouldn’t take out anyone should I wipe out.

                As they had told us, it cleared up about halfway down so we stopped (took me about 100 yards to fully stop) and took off the rain gear and then we continued to mosey down the volcano, the guide pointing out Oprah’s ranch at one point. 

                At the bottom I had built up so much speed I ran off the road into a ditch because the brakes were somewhat useless. I was a little amped up on adrenaline by then.

                We were then taken to a diner/restaurant in the town at the bottom for a nice lunch, then got back on the bus and went back to the condo. 

I was exhausted, yet exhilarated.

85 – Sirens of Titan – Al Stewart – 1975

Sirens of Titan - Al Stewart

                A song by Al Stewart, encapsulating the somewhat obscure 1959 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. sci-fi novel of the same name.

                I hadn’t read the book since the early 70’s, when I got into Kurt Vonnegut because I read “Miracle on 33^rd Street” by Phil Berger about the New York Knicks’ first NBA Championship season and it mentioned that Bill Bradley had read “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” on a team tripbus. My high school basketball teammates called me “Doc” sometimes because I read on the team bus to away games (Crown High School in the 60’s and 70’s belonged to the Tri-County Conference. Every team in it was at least a 1 hour drive from Carpentersville, so the bus rides were long and boring and I brought along such “intellectual” books as “After 1903-What?”, by Robert Benchley.

                I read “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater”, and then “Slaughterhouse Five”, and then I bought the paper backs of everything I could find of Vonnegut’s, i.e., ”Welcome to the Monkey House,” “Mother Night,” “Player Piano,” “Cat’s Cradle,” and “Sirens of Titan.”

                I just finished re-reading “Sirens of Tian” and realize how little I remember of it from the 70’s.

                It’s a wonderful read, Vonnegut creates a world that is at once funny , yet ultimately, in my reading, sad,, since all of human existence turns out to be a giant cosmic joke, which leads me to think of Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

                And when I look up “Sirens of Titan” on Wikipedia, I see a quote from Adams’, confirming his appreciation of the book. I can hear echoes of “I was victim of a series of accidents, as are we all” from “Sirens of Titan” in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

84 – Wonderland By Night -Leo Kottke – 1994

Wonderland By Night - Leo Kottke

                From 1994, this is Kottke’s take on the Bert Kaempfert hit from 1961.

                This song always takes me back to one specific memory. In 1961, my Aunt Joyce and Uncle George lived in an older home in Elgin. Unlike our 1950’s tract home in Algonquin, it had 9 or 10 foot ceilings. That’s about all I remember of the house, because their Christmas tree was so tall.

                Back then, when we visited them, I was 6 in 1961, we would be put to bed in Aunt Joyce and Uncle George’s bed until my parents were ready to go home. Then we would be woken up and/or carried to the car, where we (my sister and I) laid in the backseat of our Pontiac (no seatbelts, of course) to drive home to be woken or carried to our bed at home.

                This song was my soundtrack to that experience, being played on my aunt and uncle’s Hi-Fi and it may have only occurred once or twice, but I remember the song and also a book of cartoons on the nightstand that had one with a guy making a phone call in what appeared to be hell (or at least my 6 year old’s view of it, a fiery cave with a guy with horns). I was just learning to read then, and the cartoon haunted me so much that I still remember it, though the details are hazy.

                My folks also played this song on our RCA Hi-Fi, I still have the 45 rpm (what’s rpm, Old man?) single at home. I don’t think I can even play it, since the turntable I use to digitize my albums (though I haven’t digitized one in about 2 years) has no adapter for the big hole in the middle.

                ”First world problems,” I guess.

83 – The Train and the Gate – Leo Kottke and Days of Heaven (Main Theme) – Ennio Morricone – 1978

The Train and the Gate - Leo Kottke

Days of Heaven (main theme) - Ennio Morricone

                In 1978, just after I bought my first VHS-VCR, a humongous Magnavox that cost $800 (I had to finance it, and 12 blank tapes that ran another $300), I was watching Sneak Previews, the first PBS show with Siskel and Ebert, when they played a clip from Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. 

                As Frank Rich wrote in his Time review:

Days of Heaven is lush with brilliant images. Set in the Texas Panhandle just before World War I, this movie unleashes one spectacular panorama after another: snowy plains aglow in the blue light of a winter moon, wheatfields shimmering under a burnt autumn sun, expansive skies carpeted with cumulus clouds. There is enough beauty here for a dozen movies; yet the total effect is far from pretty. Slowly but surely the sharp images carve away at the audience's guts. 

                It was the scene near the end, when Bill (Richard Gere) and his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) are on the run from police because he has killed the husband (The Farmer -Sam Shepard) he convinced her to marry because he thought he (The Farmer) was going to die soon and they would inherit his farm and holdings. 

But Abby fell in love with The Farmer which led to the fatal confrontation between Bill and The Farmer after Bill returns to the farm after an absence and brings a plague of locusts with him that begin to eat all the wheat, until The Farmer orders the whole field and crop be burned to the ground.

                In the scene, they float down a Texas river on a raft as Linda (Linda Manz), Bill’s little sister, narrates in a stream of consciousness way about what they see and the music being played is ….wait for it…. Leo Kottke!!(not "the" clip, but the first use of Kottke in the movie)

                “Holy Crap!” I said (I was living alone at the time and had a tendency to exclaim to myself). I had heard him play at Blackburn College in 1977 and at that time he mentioned he had written some movie music. His 1978 album, “Burnt Lips” had two songs from Days of Heaven, “The Credits: Outtakes from Terry’s Movie” and this song, “The Train and the Gate: From Terry’s Movie”.

                I had to wait awhile, but Days of Heaven finally came out on home video in 1979. I rented it from Fotomat; they had little drive-up kiosks in shopping center parking lots. You drove through to rent movies.

                Oh my gosh, it was glorious, even on a 25” color TV. 

The cinematography was exquisite and the sound track sublime. Written by Ennio Morricone (who had cut his teeth on the “spaghetti” westerns of the 1960’s, along with many other films), the soundtrack is by far my favorite..ever. I went through a John Williams phase (Star Wars, Close Encounters), but Days of Heaven is the only soundtrack I still regularly listen to.

  

As soon as I could find it (I may have ordered it from Apple Tree Records in Elgin), I bought the album of the soundtrack. It was on the Pacific Arts label, owned by Michael Nesmith of the Monkees (Bert Schneider, one of the creators of the Monkees, was producer of Days of Heaven). For over 30 years there was no CD version available, so I listened on a cassette tape I had transferred the album to.

Days of Heaven was the album I listened to most in 1978, when I was writing my Master’s Thesis at Western Illinois University. I wrote every night from 10PM to 2 AM or so, listening to it and Bach and Leo Kottke’s “Dreams and All That Stuff”, an instrumental album.

When I started to digitize my albums in 2011, the first album I did was “Days of Heaven.” In 2012 I was searching Amazon.com and found that a 2-CD set had come out in 2011 of the soundtrack. I bought it and have the Main Theme on the Zune playlist and listen to the CD at work at lunchtime.

In 1979, Days of Heaven was re-released to theaters (along with An Officer and a Gentleman), as a Richard Gere two-fer, and I finally got to see the 70mm/Dolby sound version and I was blown away. It was shown at the Woodfield Theater (long gone), a large auditorium with high-backed, rocking seats.

As Roger Ebert wrote:

Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven" has been praised for its painterly images and evocative score, but criticized for its muted emotions: Although passions erupt in a deadly love triangle, all the feelings are somehow held at arm's length. This observation is true enough, if you think only about the actions of the adults in the story. But watching this 1978 film again recently, I was struck more than ever with the conviction that this is the story of a teenage girl, told by her, and its subject is the way that hope and cheer have been beaten down in her heart. We do not feel the full passion of the adults because it is not her passion: It is seen at a distance, as a phenomenon, like the weather, or the plague of grasshoppers that signals the beginning of the end

It has since become my go-to movie to gauge whether someone has the same taste in movies as I do. Most people have never heard of it, but it’s worth a view, especially if it’s on a fairly large screen. It was one of the first DVDs I bought to test out our projector TV with digital sound.  I later bought the Criterion Collection Edition on Blu-ray. 

The final scene, as Linda runs away from a boarding school to meet up with a friend she met when she worked the wheat harvest, she says simply (in the narration),”This girl..she didn’t know where she was goin’ or what she was gonna do…she didn’t have no money…maybe she’d meet up with a character…I was hoping things would work out for her…she was a good friend of mine”    the music wells up (the Main Theme, link) and so do I, every time.