35 – Don’t Bring Me Down – ELO – 1979

Don't Bring Me Down - ELO 

            Even though it comes from 1979’s “Discovery” album, when I was already back at Accutronics, working on getting my thesis into shape so I could submit it and then defend it, it still puts me in mind of Western Illinois University. It reminds me of the primitive, off-brand, portable cassette player I had at the time. As soon as I would buy an album I would tape it and then play only the cassette. On my Advent home deck, in my Mustang, or on my Sonee Walkmun. This kept my albums in pretty good shape.

            I recall listening to tapes in the room where all the Grad Assistants (GA’s), for History, Math, Psychology, and Economics, had desks. Each major had a group of desks pushed together and we used them between classes to camp out and kibbutz with the other GA’s.

            History GA’s were the lowest paid of all (reflecting what an MA in History is worth in the real world), since we didn’t teach any classes (like the Math GA’s did). We proctored exams and made ourselves available for tutoring (though in a year and a half, I don’t think any of the 5-6 GA’s were asked to do any).

            We received $210/month, plus all tuition and fees (the real payment) for 10-15 hours of “work” (sitting in a 100 level class to take notes and prepare for tutoring). Rent in the Graduate and Married student housing was $130/month, leaving $80/month for food and entertainment.

            On of the most interesting classes in Grad School was Historical Research. Each week we were exposed to a different way to look at data and sources. The first project was a gigantic scavenger hunt, we were given a list of 35 questions and had one week to get the answers from the Reference section of the library.

            Questions like: Who was your congressman on the day you were born? How much cotton was produced in the US in 1854? And what was the population of Chicago in 1897? All of us taking the class scurried about the library for 2 or 3 days, then we got smart and got together and shared locations and books used to answer the questions, thereby reducing our overall work.

            Remember now, this is pre-Internet, 1977, and everything was in a book (“What’s a book, grandpa?”) somewhere in the Reference section of the library, not a few keystrokes away on your laptop.

            Another week we completed a project whereby a computer (it took up a whole room in another campus building) was used to collate data and generate a graph (as I recall). We spent 1-2 days keypunching data onto IBM cards, then took the whole stack over to the computer building (making sure not to drop or mix them in any way) and handed them to the tech who fed them into the computer and the next day you came in and picked up your report/graph.

            One thing for sure, I would have killed to have had a word processor in 1979, when I was working my thesis into shape. I hand wrote my first draft of each chapter, as I do for this blog, (I write it out on lined paper I print, because my handwriting is small. Lines are .125 apart, and I write on every other line to allow for revisions).

            My thesis was written on narrow ruled paper (.250 wide lines), one hand written page becoming three pages typewritten, then typed on my Sears portable electric typewriter, and submitted to my thesis advisor, Dr. Victor Hicken. WIU had very specific requirements for the thesis when ready. It had to be a certain font, on a certain bond paper, and three copies were needed. All were bound in leather, one is in the WIU library, one is in the WIU History department, and I have the third.

            My mom typed up my final draft on a typewriter where she worked at the time and I submitted it in early 1979. Then Dr. Hicken came back with several revisions. If it was a word or two, I could retype the page (once I found a typewriter with the same font at Accu), but if the revision was a line or two, I would have to re-type the page, plus all the following pages of that chapter.

            What a pain.

            Plus, Dr. Hicken felt my thesis needed some maps of the battles my regiment fought in. (I wrote a history of the 36^th Illinois Regiment, called the Fox River Regiment). I had to find a book that was not covered by copyright anymore so I could photocopy the maps and use them in my thesis. I found one at the Abraham Lincoln Bookstore in Chicago.

            It did get me a date with a cutie at Accu who retyped several pages for me. I had a huge crush on Bev, but she was out of my league. After doing the typing I paid her back by taking her to see William Windom play “Thurber” at Aurora’s glorious Paramount theater and then to see the Blues Brothers live at Poplar Creek.

            Poplar Creek was an outdoor arena in nearby Hoffman Estates that seated 10,000 in the covered pavilion and another 20,000 or so, on the lawn. I invited a friend from Blackburn who lived in the area, Mike P, and my best friend from Accu, Jorge B. plus their wives, to go along.

            We got a large pizza from the Pizza Stop (long gone) in Cary and dragged it all the way to Poplar Creek, where the guards at the front gate patted it down (it was in a large, flat, paper bag) before letting us bring it in to eat as we sat on the lawn.

            This concert was the night before the movie opened and the crowd was shouting for “Rawhide”, since Steve Dahl had been playing it in the weeks leading up to the show. Even though they didn’t play it, it was still a great concert. Steve Cropper and “Duck” Dunn, from Booker T and the MG’s, horn section of Tom Malone and Lou Marini, Paul Schaffer on keyboards, and others, plus Dan Aykroyd with his harmonica in the briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, and John Belushi being John Belushi, cartwheeling onto the stage at the start (“Everybody needs somebody… everybody needs somebody… to love”… “Someone to love”).

            Doesn’t get much better…

Everybody Needs Somebody - Blues Brothers

            A couple nights later I took Bev to see the Blues Brothers movie in McHenry, where the audience went wild whenever a scene shot in the area came on screen (much of the exterior shooting of the final car chase was filmed on Route 12 in Lake County, and another scene, with a huge PA megaphone attached to the roof of the Bluesmobile (“Tell your friends!”) was shot at Bang’s Lake in Lake Zurich). It was my last date with Bev, though we remained friendly at Accu.

            Oh well. (See11- To Be What You Must, for a refresher on my philosophy).         

34- Jekyll and Hyde – 1979 and 48 – Northern Lights – 1978 – Renaissance

Jekyll and Hyde - Renaissance

Northern Lights - Renaissance 

            For the life of me I can’t remember how I learned about Renaissance. It was likely they were mentioned in an article in Rolling Stone, which I subscribed to from the mid-70s to around 2005, when I dropped it due to budget constraints.

            I seem to recall reading somewhere that their sound was almost medieval, a rock combination of Jethro Tull and Gregorian chants (or something like that). I checked my collection of back articles I cut out of Rolling Stone and reduced on a copier to 8.5 x 11 and put in a binder and can find no articles about them.

            As a fan of medieval history (23 – Year of the Cat) I thought they’d be worth a listen. In the pre- iTunes days it was hard to get a sample of a group, especially one with no airplay (at least not on any station I was listening to in the mid-80s).

            You would just go out and take a leap of faith and buy an album and hope it was listenable. I found Leo Kottke this way (see What’s All This, Then?), buying an album just because his name was mentioned in a Stereo Review article about Cat Stevens. It didn’t even say what sort of music he performed; it just said Cat listened to him.

            Renaissance has an interesting sound on most of the mid to late 70s albums (some of the early albums have songs that run 9-10 minutes, which is a little too self-indulgent for me) and Annie Haslam has a great voice, showcased especially on “Northern Lights”.

33 – Six Months in a Leaky Boat – 1982 – Split Enz

Six Months in a Leaky Boat - Split Enz -1982

            From another album, “Time and Tide,” that I bought back in the day after viewing the MTV video.

            Reminds me of the summer of 1982 when I was preparing for my entry into Southern Illinois University Law School in August.

            When I went to Blackburn in 1975, my plan was to go to law school and become a Nader’s Raider, but when I went to see my advisor my second day on campus, John Van Gelder Forbes, eminence grise (though, in fact about my age now) chairman of the History department, in his cramped, overflowing office up the back stairs behind the chapel, he told me I had little chance of getting in.

            He said I needed a 3.8 GPA to get in. If I hadn’t been sitting, I would have fallen over; I got light headed as I saw my whole future disappearing into a pipe dream. I was transferring from ECC with a B average (3.0) and there was no way to get to 3.8, even if I went 4.0 for two years, the average would be 3.5 for the four years.

            I was crushed. I went back to my dorm and used the pay phone (the only phone in the dorm with an outside line, there were two other phones in the dorm for intra-college calls) to call home to tell them I was quitting.

            Luckily, my folks talked me off the ledge and told me to try another advisor. The next day I talked with Dr. Richard Piper, of the Political Science (Randy Newman shout out!) department, and he got me back to solid ground by telling me that there were law schools that would take 3.5, or less, so I changed my major to Poli Sci. A few weeks later I saw that I was closer to a Social Sciences degree so I changed to that, and about a month after that I came full circle, back to History, mainly due to Dr. Michael G.R. Kelley, a great, charismatic teacher who would be my major influence at Blackburn.

            My last semester at BU, having been on the Dean’s List all three semesters, I took the LSAT and only got a 610. That, plus my GPA, kept me out of the schools I applied to. So when Dr. Kelley told me he would recommend me for the assistantship at Western Illinois, I jumped at it.

            As I’ve written earlier (6 & 9 – Disarm, 1979, 23-Year of the Cat, 24-Mr. Blue Sky) Western was an interesting time. When I completed my MA in 1979 I was already back at Accutronics, where I stayed for several years until I got the bug again to go to law school. I re-took the LSAT, and with no new prep, improved my score by 100 points. That, plus my 3.90 GPA at WIU, got me in at Southern Illinois law school in 1982.

            SIU Law School was almost brand new in 1982, the building was on their fraternity row and the dorms were directly across the street. As a reader, I looked forward to throwing myself into law school. Little did I know that I’d be reading from the time I got up, around 7 AM, to midnight, most days. I was reading case law, text books, and law journals, spending most of my waking hours in the Law library. I was swamped.

            And the classes for the first year student were all mandatory, Contracts, Torts, Property, Legal History, and Legal Writing. Torts was taught by a professor who had seen the “The Paper Chase” too many times, I think. He would look down at his seating chart, call out a name, then when he was through with the first person, he would continue down that row. When called upon, you would stand up and he would begin to throw hypotheticals at you, until you were so addled he’d finally feel pity and pull the hook out of your mouth and move on to the next person. (I’m sure not every student felt that dread, as he came down your row, but I sure did)

            I had previously had only one experience like that in college. At BU, as a History major, I was required to take American Constitutional Law with John Van Gelder Forbes. Dr. Forbes, and his wife Lydia, the head librarian at Lumpkin Library, were institutions at BU. During WWII, Dr. Forbes was a conscientious objector, he was a Quaker, which must have been a hard row to hoe.

            My senior year, BU brought a comedian on campus for a show, John Roarke, a gifted mimic, who did a great Groucho. I don’t know if he was told that Dr. Forbes’ wife was named Lydia, but he sang Groucho’s signature song, “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady”

            Lydia, oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia?
            Lydia the tattooed lady
            She has eyes that men adore so
            And a torso even more so
            Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclopedia
            Lydia, the queen of tattoo
            On her back is the Battle of Waterloo
            Beside it the Wreck of the Hesperus, too
            And proudly above waves the red, white and blue
            You can learn a lot from Lydia

            When her robe is unfurled, she will show you the world
            If you step up and tell her where
            For a dime you can see Kankakee or Paree
            Or Washington crossing the Delaware

            Lydia, oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia?
            Lydia the tattooed lady
            When her muscles start relaxin'
            Up the hill comes Andrew Jackson
            Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclopedia
            Lydia, the queen of tattoo
            For two bits she will do a mazurka in jazz
            With a view of Niagara that nobody has
            And on a clear day, you can see Alcatraz
            You can learn a lot from Lydia

            Come along and see Buffalo Bill with his lasso
            Just a little classic by Mendel Picasso
            Here's Captain Spaulding exploring the Amazon
            Here's Godiva but with her pajamas on

            Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclopedia
            Lydia, the queen of them all
            She once swept an admiral clean off his feet
            The ships on her hips made his heart skip a beat
            And now the old boy's in command of the fleet
            For he went and married Lydia

                        (words and music by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg)

            Quite the scandal, I recall.

            Con Law was an 8AM course on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. (At BU, Tuesday and Thursday AM classes also met on Saturday. Because everything on campus was student run, through the work program, Saturday AM classes kept you on campus until noon, at least. Afternoon classes on Tuesday and Thursday were longer, since they didn’t meet on Saturdays).

            For our Final exam the first semester (it was a two semester class) we would have an oral test. Each student would be asked to stand to answer two questions. A large part of your grade depended on your answers. Dr. Forbes also had another requirement for this class; you had to memorize the first ten amendments of the Constitution and go to his office and write them down with no mistakes.

            For the final exam, he asked the men to wear a shirt and tie and the ladies dresses. I got a bug up my butt for some reason and refused to wear a tie (I hadn’t brought one to school with me and I wasn’t about to go out and buy one for one day) so I wore a sweater. He never mentioned it and the exam went OK. I think he gave an A to everyone that semester.

            The good thing about the Torts class at SIU was he followed his seating chart religiously, and you could work out whether he was going to get to you on a particular day. One day, however, he called on me once and I sat down thinking I was through for the day when, several minutes later, he called on me a second time. Crap! I stood up again and he peppered me with hypotheticals until he let me loose.

            I had never examined my reason for studying law, beyond working for Ralph Nader, but this experience let me know that my future was not likely to be in a courtroom. Lacking the ability to think quickly on my feet, I probably would not be the reincarnation of Clarence Darrow or “Judd for the Defense” or even Lionel Hutz.

            After the class, several people came up to me and asked, “What did you do?” to get called on a second time. I never knew. No one else had ever been called on twice in the same class period. I had not had any contact with him outside the class and had never been anything but terrified in his class.

            I wish I could remember what the hypotheticals were about, but luckily my mind is pretty blank about much of my time in law school. All I remember about Torts is that you can’t use life threatening force to protect property, i.e., a guy set up a shotgun aimed at the front door of an empty property so that someone breaking in would be shot as he came through the door. A thief did, was shot, and successfully sued the guy whose house he was breaking into,

            I remember nothing from Property, Contracts, or legal History.

            I do remember going out to the movies in Carbondale. I vividly recall “The Road Warrior”, “Pink Floyd’s The Wall”, and, especially, Stephen King’s “Creepshow”. A group of people behind me went nuts during the section with E.G Marshall and his battle with cockroaches, yelling directions to the screen, “No, don’t go there, don’t open that door!”

            At SIU that year I also had my first exposure to William Windom doing James Thurber. I had been an avid reader and collector of Thurber’s books, along with those of Robert Benchley and S.J. Perlman, and had been a big fan of Windom in “My World and Welcome To It” a TV show where he played a character based on the writings of Thurber, as a put upon married man who fantasized, much like that great Thurber character, Walter Mitty.

            I saw him do a different one man show of Thurber, in Aurora’s Paramount Theater, several years later.

            The main thing I didn’t like about law school was you had no idea where you stood throughout the semester, there were no tests or quizzes, your whole grade was determined by the final exam.

            Also, I never “got” legal writing. I had written a Master’s Thesis and had it accepted, but legal writing is different, and I had a hard time with it. There was a format that had to be followed and I was unable to make my writing fit it, for some reason, certainly not for lack of trying.

            When I took the finals I was burned out. I looked forward to getting back into the real world where I could read junk that had nothing to do with the law and watch crap on TV.  I did not have a good feeling about the tests. In the law, there is no right or wrong answer. You have to be able to argue both sides of any issue, ‘cause you have to be able to argue the position of whoever’s paying your fees.

            When I came back to school after Christmas/New Year’s break, I checked my results and they were dismal. You couldn’t flunk out after one semester, but I was near the bottom of every list. I went to my room, got my stuff, loaded up my 1979 Mustang, sold my books back to the book store, withdrew from school, and drove home, tail between my legs.

            I didn’t go back to Accu right away (see 3- No More Lonely Nights), but my dreams of being a Nader’s Raider were over.

32 – Here Comes My Baby – Cat Stevens – 1967

Here Comes My Baby - Cat Stevens

            Hearing this song, written when Mr. Stevens was 18 years old, takes me to a specific place and time:  Accutronics in my first month there, January 1974. I had been hired to be a shear operator for the grand salary of $2.65/hour. The normal start rate was $2.30/hour, but I was a college student so they thought I might have some smarts.

            The main job of the shear operator was shearing, obviously, though I was also required to unload skids of laminate, the copper covered material that’s the basis of all printed circuit boards, and load and unload 55 gallon drums of ferric chloride, the acid used to etch copper from the laminate to create the circuit traces on the boards.

            What the job entailed was taking large sheets of laminate, ranging from 36”x48”, up to 36”x72” and cutting them into smaller process panels (12x16, 14x18, etc.) to be imaged, etched, and punched. The material of choice in 1974, for most of the boards we built, was a laminate called XXXP, which was paper/phenolic based. It needed 10-15 seconds under a quartz heater lamp before shearing.

            My very first day, the supervisor put me on a smaller, manual shear, to shear some process panels into strips for the punch press operator to feed into the die. He just showed me where to shear and left me alone to shear panel after panel. Each time I’d step on the lever the blade would come down and make a crackling “zzzzip!”, and the strip would fall into a wooden box on the other side. It was my first 10 minutes in the shop; I thought it was supposed to sound like that.

            The material was manufactured by Dynamit Nobel and was the most brittle and dangerous material around then (dangerous because if you didn’t heat it enough the shear would fracture it into razor sharp edges. I brushed up against a stack with my hand once and was shocked when I saw about 10 cuts on my knuckles that bled like a stuck pig)

            Then, a roving inspector, a wonderful lady named Henrietta, came by to check on me and said, “You’re not heating these up. The shear is fracturing every piece!” I looked down at the pile of cracked strips and said,”No one said anything about heating them!” She went off to get the supervisor, who then showed me the heater box you were supposed to use to heat up the panels, and on I went.

            On the power shear, the one I was hired to run, we had a quartz lamp that hung perpendicular from the wall, and was adjustable in height. You would look at the shear order, set the shear bar to the required width with a crank that moved it, and then manually set the back gage to the size of the final cut, usually the same distance. (A six foot sheet would typically have 4 – 18” cuts in its length, and 3- 12” cuts in its width).

            At the time I worked it, it was a two man operation. I would heat each of the 3 cut areas, and then feed it through the shear to a guy on the other side who would grab it and hold it against the bar on his side, I’d step on the pedal and the motor would drive the blade through the material, making a clean cut. I’d push it through again for a second, and then a third cut, then pull it back against the bar gage on my side making the final cut. All within about 10 seconds, so the material would not cool and fracture.

            Many of the jobs at Accutronics back then required two people, one to feed, the other to catch. This changed as time went on and automation came in (Today, almost all laminate comes pre-cut from the vendor). Nowadays most processes have a machine to feed the boards and an accumulator at the other end to catch and stack them. You just need a person to set up the line itself and it runs on its own.

            However, the labor intensive nature of the jobs back then caused you to have to make conversation with your partner. Usually, I had a radio playing (as did a lot of other people) and you’d talk about music or have trivia contests. Anything to pass the time.

            One day they had this sort of biker dude work with me. I was 19, naïve, a little scared of the guy in T-shirt and engineer boots. I wore, and wear to this day, button down shirts and either Converse suede One-Stars, Red Wings, or desert boots.

            Steve B. (the biker dude) and I sheared away and then the Tremeloes’ version of this song came on. “I like this song,” said Steve. “You know who wrote that?” I asked, starting a trivia contest. After several guesses I told him, “Cat Stevens.” “No!” “Yeah, when he was about 18” “I never knew.” And I went on to describe Cat’s early pop star career, tuberculosis, and rebirth as sensitive singer-songwriter in 1970. It was the beginning of a work friendship that lasted until Steve left a year or so later.

            Accutronics in the 1974-1980 time period was a very fun and interesting place to work.  Cary, Illinois, had a few businesses, but no Mickey D’s or other fast food places. High school and college aged kids went through Accu as a rite of passage almost, along with a group of bored housewives and mothers who also passed through there.

            Most of the college aged kids stopped through on their way to something better, whether it was college or a different job. Nobody planned on staying there forever, especially me, but here it is 40 years later and I’m still in the biz.

            But like I said in “To Be What You Must…” (number 11), I wouldn’t have it any other way.

            This song also reminds me of another friend I made almost 20 years later, at Dynacircuits, Oscar. S. They used to play music over the PA in the office. One day the Tremeloes’ version came on and I asked Oscar, “Know who wrote this?” starting up a little trivia quiz to pass the time.”No.””Cat Stevens!” “Who?” “Cat Stevens!” “Never heard of him.”

            It became a running gag for years after with Oscar at the two other board shops we worked together at. Some song would come on the radio, maybe AC/DC, I’d ask Oscar, “Who wrote this?” he would reply, “Cat Stevens?” and laughter would ensue.

31 – Everyone’s Gone to the Moon – Jonathan King – 1965

Everyone's Gone to the Moon - Jonathan King

            I don’t know what it is about this song, maybe it’s the use of swirling orchestral strings, but it always saddens me a little when I hear it. Still, I like it for the feelings and memories it invokes. It reminds me of the mid 60’s when I was 9-10 and the future seemed so bright. And then here comes Denny Downer, whining about everybody abandoning him (us?) for the moon,

            I was a huge space program fan as a kid, and that future was not to be dissed. I had large scale models of both the Gemini and Apollo capsules. In fact, the Apollo was the top third of the Saturn V rocket and contained both the capsule and the LEM (Lunar Excursion module). It was about 2 feet high and was pretty cool.

            It blew up “real good” several years later (along with my Star Trek Enterprise, Klingon warship, and flying sub (from “Voyage to See What’s on the Bottom”) models)), when I got a hold of some firecrackers. Probably blew up my kids’ college fund with those five models.

            It also triggers memories of my aunt and uncle who lived in Marengo, Illinois. At the time, their house backed up on a farm (now completely built up with houses). It seemed they were in the middle of nowhere. It was about a 45 minute drive from Algonquin, mainly through farmland. Though their house was newer (mid-1950s, I think), the neighborhood was built into an area with huge, old growth oak trees.

            I still have occasional dreams about that house for some reason, though I haven’t been in it in over 40 years. It was a simple three bedroom ranch who’s each room was larger than our three bedroom ranch in Algonquin, but in my dreams there are hidden rooms that made the house go on and on, though I’m sure if I saw it today it would seem much smaller.

            They had a barbed wire fence at the back of their lot that was electrified, scary to a little kid. I recall overhearing a story about a girl who was out in the winter snow with only her PJs on, and when she climbed over the fence to escape her pursuers, she cut her feet on the barbed wire and she was tracked by her bloody prints in the snow (I overheard only part of this story and the image that sticks in my head is the blood in the snow).

            It also triggers memories of seeing the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show there (they had a partially finished basement for TV viewing, unlike my other four aunts, or us) when I was nine. I remember my parents commenting (I think it was required) on how “long” their hair was. This song also reminds me for some reason of Freddie and the Dreamers, another British Invasion band that was on Ed Sullivan several times, doing a goofy dance called, unlikely as it seems, “The Freddie”.

            It also reminds me of the first “adult” joke I ever heard, from my uncle Wayne. He told it to me and my cousin, David, at one of our family get togethers. (My dad had five sisters, and all lived within a 25 mile radius of Elgin, and we would get together at holidays and for picnics. There were 13-14 cousins, I think).

            I was about 11 or 12 when he told us…..

                        “This guy goes out to buy a car and the salesman takes him on                    a test drive of a new sports car. He punches the gas pedal and the car goes 
                        from 0-60 mph in five seconds, screaming around the countryside, they       
                        approach a rail crossing and, out of nowhere, a train appears. The salesman 
                        slams on the brakes; the car stops a foot from the speeding train.

                        “Smell that?” the salesman asks, “That’s tire rubber, best tires on the road!”

                        The guy buys the car and takes his buddy out for a spin. Going 0-60 in
                         five seconds, screaming around the countryside, they come up on the same
                         railroad  crossing and out of nowhere a train appears. The guy slams on his
                         brakes and the car stops a foot from the passing train.

                        “Smell that?” the guy asks his buddy.

                        “Smell it? I’m sitting in it!”

            I looked at my cousin, he looked at me, we didn’t get it.

            My uncle Wayne said, “He pooped in his pants he was so scared!”

            We exploded in laughter, bending over at the waist, holding our stomachs, bobbing up and down in unison.

            It was great to be considered adult enough to hear such sophisticated humor!

 

30 – It’s Money That Matters – Randy Newman – 1988

It's Money That Matters (Live on SNL)

            This song is from one of my favorite Randy Newman albums, 1988’s “Land of Dreams.” I seem to enjoy quite a few artists whose voices are, shall we say, challenged. Randy Newman would be exhibit A, but no one else can sing his songs as well (I’m not talking about his work in films, “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” (Toy Story), etc., which are usually sung by better singers).

            Even though I was introduced to Randy Newman by David Steinberg’s rendition of “Political Science (Let’s Drop the Big One)”, Newman’s version is the best, I’m also ignoring “Mama Told Me Not to Come” by Three Dog Night, their version is superior.

            Other artists I like who maybe don’t have the best voices:

            Jimmy Webb – Singer, songwriter, I like his versions of his hits, sung by others on the hit version, and I’ll write about them as they come up on the Zune.

            Leo Kottke – I like his voice, too, even though he famously calls it sounding like “geese farts in a fog” on the liner notes of “Mudlark”. There are several vocals here on my Zune which I’ll be discussing in future postings.

            Billy Corgan – Very distinctive voice, somewhat whiny, but I like Smashing Pumpkins for other reasons as well.

            Steve Dahl – “Margarita”, good song, voice…OK.

            Trevor Horn – vocals, songwriter, The Buggles, an acquired taste.

            Warren Zevon – adequate…

            Mark Knopfler – Great duet with James Taylor on “Sailing to Philadelphia,” coming soon on Kaffred’s  Zune

            Maybe it’s because I’s easier to sing along with voices slightly better/worse than mine?

29 – I’ve got a Thing about Seeing My Grandson Grow Old – Cat Stevens – 1970

I've Got a Thing About Seeing My Grandson Grow Old

             I first heard this song in 2002 when the Cat Stevens Box Set came out. The song itself comes from the “Mona Bone Jakon” sessions of 1970, when his sound became more introspective following his year long bout with tuberculosis.

            It reminds me of my short stint at Sonic, which I talked about a little in the very first posting (“What’s All This Then?”). I had come back there and spent some of my time downloading songs from Grokster. We were slow, the main reason we were shut down after only being in business 10-11 months.

            I remember the box set was a revelation, in that there really hadn’t been anything new from Cat (now Yusuf) since “Footsteps in the Dark”(1984), a best-of compilation that finally gave us the songs from “Harold and Maude”(there it is again) that had never appeared on any album (17-If You Want to Sing Out…). There are several songs that I’d never heard before, (“If Only Mother Could See Me Now”, “The Joke,”  and “The Day They Make me Tsar”)including his version of “Portobello Road” an early song I had only heard covered by his guitarist Alun Davies on his album “Daydo”.

            There’s even a duet with Elton John, a song called “Honey Man”, I like each of them separately, but their voices don’t blend well, to my ear.

            Had this song  (I’ve Got a Thing…) been released as a single, I’m sure Wally Phillips would have been able to wring several days out of Cat’s pronunciation of vitamin (see also, 27-“Morning Has Broken”). He uses the British pronunciation of vitt-a-min, as opposed to the American vite-a-min,

            Anyway, it’s a nice sentiment, but at 58, with a 3 year old and a 7 year old, seeing a grandson grow old may be problematic.  Maybe something along the lines of “Seeing My Grandson Change My Depends” is more likely in my future.

28 – Viva La Vida – Coldplay – 2008

Viva La Vida - Coldplay

            I think this is the newest song on my Zune, bought from the Zune Marketplace.  I don’t have any idea what the rest of the album sounds like, I only bought the song. Kind of like buying a single at the Ben Franklin back in the day. (For you young whippersnappers out there, the Ben Franklin was a five and dime store, kind of like the Dollar stores of today, but they also sold 45 rpm singles as well…”What’s a 45 rpm single old man?” “Shut up”)

            I absolutely love this song, I don’t know why. It gets multiple plays every time it comes on the Zune and I sing along every time as well. I don’t know what it’s about, or what the lyrics mean, but it has a great chorus, perfect for singing loudly in an echoing room…

                        “I hear Jerusalem bells a-ringing,

Roman cavalry choirs are singing,

Be my mirror, my sword and shield,

Missionaries in a foreign field…”

            Meaning: Huh?

            It reminds me of a specific time, March-August 2009. In March, the company I worked for in Cary, Bartlett Manufacturing, went belly up. The owner gave up and shut it down, throwing 60+ people out of work. This was about 5 months after we took a 28% pay cut (which I am still trying to climb back from) to help keep it running. He had entered into an agreement with the owner of another shop in Round Lake Beach and they were supposed to keep Bartlett open for 3 months until the work there transitioned to Round Lake, but he decided to just give up and shut it down, blaming the Chinese.

            Most of the supervisors and managers at Bartlett had been offered positions at Round Lake, but I had not. I had worked there (Round Lake Beach) five years earlier for 6 months until one day I was fired. The explanation was that I had “blown off” a customer in for a visit, but I am still convinced L.S. (see Update posting) had something to do with it. I had asked another manager to cover for me with the customer as I had a particularly tricky corrective action to finish for their biggest military customer. It was for an issue that occurred a year before I got there and was very serious. I thought the CAR (corrective action report) was more important than the customer visit. I was wrong.

            Regardless, I was not expecting to get an offer to go to Round Lake. But on the very last day of Bartlett Mfg., the owner of the shop in Round Lake asked to talk to me. He started by apologizing for my getting fired (I had been fired by his President, not him), saying he had been told what they thought he wanted to hear, which he subsequently came to believe was not the whole truth. I was floored. He then offered me a job with his company, but not as a Quality Manager, since he already had one, but in a position TBD.

            This led to one of the most interesting periods in my career.

            At first, I helped the QA manager at Round Lake as a quasi-quality engineer, helping him put together PPAPs, FMEAs, and Control Plans (a bunch of paperwork gobbledygook required by Bartlett’s automotive customers, which Round Lake had no experience with at this time)

            After the closing of Bartlett it quickly became apparent that since none of the people from the punch press department took positions in Round Lake someone would be needed to run orders out at Bartlett until the presses could be moved to Round Lake, to a 17,000 sq.ft. building down the block being prepared. Among those who took jobs in Round Lake only the former president of Bartlett and I had ever set up dies and run the punch presses. The former president only stayed for a month before he left to open a rep firm, leaving me.

            I had not set up or run a press in about 15 years, when I had helped Gary Kelly (see #1-mmmm.mmmm) build boards in a small shop he set up in Elgin, less than a mile from where we then lived. I worked at Dynacircuits during the day, and then worked 4-5 hours every other night for cash at Gary’s, setting up and running silk screening, setting up and running a punch press, and doing some visual inspection.

            So, for the next 5 months, as the Bartlett building was being gutted around me, I would drive from Elgin to Cary to run the presses, and then run the finished boards up to Round Lake for inspection and shipment. There were only 3-4 other people in this 73,000 sq. ft. building, and I was by myself, pushing 500 lb. dies around and setting up 110 ton presses, running the presses, listening to my Zune in the huge echoing (thought I wouldn’t explain that, huh?) punch press room pumped through a stereo boom box I found in the abandoned front office. The phone system was disconnected so the only contact with the outside world (and the others in the building), should something happen to me, was with cell phones.

            I was 54 years old, with a bad hip, doing more physical work than I’d done in years. And it was fun! And “Viva La Vida” was a great accompaniment.

            Note: If anyone out there knows how I can link some video I took of myself (I put the video camera on a ladder as I struggled with dies and ran punch presses)doing this work, I’d greatly appreciate it.

27 - Morning Has Broken - Art Garfunkel

27 – Morning Has Broken – Art Garfunkel

 Morning Has Broken - Art Garfunkel

The church hymn made famous by Cat Stevens in 1972, this is Art Garfunkel’s take on it and I like it. Whenever I visit a church, for a wedding or baptism or recital, I always pull the hymnal from the back of the pew in front of me and see if it’s in there. I’ve never gotten to sing it in a service, though.

Every time I hear it I think of my youth (early 70s) when I woke up to Wally Phillips on WGN. This was pre-Steve Dahl Rude Awakening when radio in Chicago was quite lame in the morning. I had listened to Chuck Benson and Kurt Russell on WIND in the late 60’s; they were a wacky morning team. I actually sent away for a free can of wind (WIND, get it?) that was a can of Freon with a WIND label on it. I still have it in a box somewhere.

Wally Phillips spent several days; it seemed, on what the correct pronunciation of recreation was. Cat Stevens pronounced the word as” … God’s reck-reation of a new day” and Artie (and most of Wally’s listeners) pronounce it  “…God’s re-creation of a new day.”

Wally specialized in the mundane. He also had a running discussion (he did have 4 hours a day to fill!) of whether you place toilet rolls on the holder with the first sheet coming off the top or from underneath. I know it sounds pretty lame, but until Monty Python, David Letterman, SNL, and Steve Dahl came around in the mid-to-late 70’s, I was pretty lame.

I remember hearing “Spam” on Dr. Demento in 1974 and it sparked my search for all things Python, which culminated in my acquisition of the “Matching Tie and Handkerchief”, the three-sided album.

When I went away to Blackburn College, I met Tom W. (see Randy Newman, “God’s Song” #5) who worked in the AV dept. Part of his job (and at Blackburn you worked 15 hours per week on campus to pay for room and board) was to get up early each weekday morning and record a show from St. Louis public TV, “Guten Tag” on an early VCR and then set up and play it to the German language class. The pre-VHS/Beta VCRs in 1975 were huge, the tapes about the size of Shaquille O’Neal’s shoeboxes.

When CBS ran the heavily edited “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in early 1977, Tom taped it and we gathered in the AV room in Lumpkin Library to watch and memorize most of the movie.

Highlights: John Cleese as his then wife Connie Booth was being taken to be burned as a witch, “Well, she turned me into a newt!” When those surrounding him look skeptically at him, he says sheepishly, “I got better.” And of course John Cleese again as the Black Knight when he is reduced to an armless, legless torso, “Come back here! I’m not through with you!” to Graham Chapman’s King Arthur, who replies, “What are you going to do…bleed on me?”

26 - Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring - Leo Kottke - 1969

26 – Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring – Leo Kottke – 1969

Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring - Leo Kotke

            This one comes from the second album I bought of Leo’s, “6 and 12 String Guitar”, and his version of the Bach standard is my favorite (I have 3 versions, one from the “Bach”, two album set that Columbia put out, one from Walter/Wendy Carlos’ “Switched on Bach”, and Kottke’s).

            Bach lends itself well to Kottke’s finger picking style and I always marvel at his fluidity and quietness. He used to play it all the time at the live shows I attended in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, at Chicago’s Park West, Hemmens Auditorium here in Elgin, and my favorite venue, which he plays almost every year, this year being the 28^th, the Woodstock Opera House.

            Most people may remember the Opera House from “Groundhog Day” as the tower Bill Murray throws himself from in his attempt to break the endless loop his life has become, trapped in the same day in “Punxatawny, PA.” Orson Welles performed Shakespeare from the same stage where he attended the Todd School in the 1920’s. It’s interesting to envision that booming voice, even when he was a teenager, overwhelming the audience of the Woodstock Opera House.

            I find it the perfect venue for Leo Kottke, a quiet performer who maintains an intimacy with his audience, especially when it is as close as it is at Woodstock. It seats about 325, and no seat is very far away, only 10 rows or so on the main floor, 8 in the balcony. And the acoustics are perfect for catching Kottke’s sometimes baffling, sometimes hysterical, asides and stories.

            I haven’t seen him for 5 years or so, the last time was at the Hemmens here in Elgin, where he played with the only other performer more eccentric than him, Leon Redbone. This guy is the same as he was 40 years ago on Saturday Night Live. He also had some sort of call and response-type inside joke going on that left 99% of the audience going “Huh?”

UPDATE>>>>>

It’s time for another update to try to explain why this blog has become so sporadic.

Late last year, just before Christmas, Lynn’s 83 year old mom became sick and was hospitalized. This lady went through 4 bouts with cancer just since I knew her (23 years) and she always bounced back. This time the cancer had spread and the prognosis was not good. She passed away on January 12, 2013. This created a strain at home as Lynn tried to visit her whenever possible and I could get home to watch the kids.

Also, things at work started to become stressful. I was basically a one man department and then the owner’s lick spittle decided he didn’t want to do part of his job anymore and started piling jobs on my desk for verification. It required me to use CAD/CAM software to view and verify data, something I’d never done.

I gave the files back to L.S. and said, “I have no problem learning how to do this, but someone needs to train me on the use of the software.” He threw the files back on my desk and said, “You can read the Help files, can’t you?” and walked out of the office. Anyone who’s ever done CAM will tell you reading the help files alone will do nothing. I struggled for the next month or so, teaching myself (with the help of a couple CAM engineers who worked for L.S.) to move around in the software to do what I needed to do, but much, much more slowly.

Then I saw an ad online for a job at the place where my old friend, Mr. Mortimer, was. It was as an engineer instead of a manager, but I was looking to reduce my commute from 2-3 hours to an hour or so, which this would. I contacted Bob H. and we corresponded and it turned out they could offer pretty much what I was then making, with a promise of a review (which I had not had in 4+ years, indeed I was still 20% below what I made in 2008, all the salaried people there took 20% cuts that never came back) in 6-9 months. And Mr. Mortimer and Bob H. were contemplating retiring in 3 years and wanted me to help plug a hole when Bob H. (QA Mgr) left.

So, realizing L.S. would never leave (nor could he, since he was persona non grata with the military due to an earlier transgression, which would have gotten anyone else fired, but like I said, he’s a champion lick spittle) and would always have the owner’s ear, I had no future there and I took the new position starting April 1.

Since then, Lynn’s mom’s house went on the market and sold in 2 days and Lynn has had to work with her 2 brothers and 1 sister to clean and prep the house for the closing, going through a lifetime’s accumulation of stuff, trying to decide who gets what and what is worth keeping. It’s also been very stressful.

Also, during this past month and a half or so our main computer crashed, trapping all our pictures and videos of the kids and though I’ve bought a new one, I haven’t had time to set it up and recover what data I can from the crashed system.

Time is at a premium, obviously, and I have several projects hanging that I can’t get free to do, so blogging has fallen off the radar. I have a couple drafts of new posts, but I don’t have the time at work I had at the previous job to jot notes and sometimes even do a hand written draft (I know, I was using company time, but I only did it to clear my head and recharge for the task at hand there. It helps me sometimes to write something not work related to get me focused on writing reports for the military)

25 – I Think I See the Light - Yusuf Islam – 2005 and 96 – I Think I See the Light – Cat Stevens – 1970

I Think I See the Light - 1970

I Think I See the Light - 2005

            Here is another favorite of mine, two versions, actually, one by Cat Stevens from 1970 and the other from his “comeback” album of 2005 as Yusuf Islam. The earlier version is being sung to a girl and the second seems to be sung to God.

            In the 1970 version, Cat sings in the second verse…

                        My heart was made of stone, my eyes saw only misty gray,

                        Until you came into my life, girl, I saw everyone that way,

                        Until I found the one I needed at my side

I think I would have been a sad man all my life.

            In 2005, Yusuf sings…

                        Until you came into my life I saw everyone that way,

                        Until I found the one I needed at my side

                        I think I would have been a blind man all my life.

            The jaunty piano break that follows in the 1970 version is replaced by a jazzy, muted trumpet break in the 2005 version. I like them both.

            As most Cat-philes know, after hitting the pinnacle of pop stardom at 18, with hits like “I Love My Dog”, and “Here Comes My Baby”, he partied until he dropped, literally. A collapsed lung and then tuberculosis kept him in hospital for almost a year. When he came back with Mona Bone Jakon in 1970, it was a more introspective Cat.

            I started buying his albums in 1971, when Tea for the Tillerman came out, and as the albums came out in the 70’s, each one seemed to have one or two songs that addressed his search for…something. It seemed he didn’t know what exactly he was searching for, but the titles alone could be evocative: “I Wish, I Wish,” “On the Road to Find Out,” “Father and Son,” “The Wind,” part of the “Foreigner Suite,” (which Yusuf incorporated into “Heaven/Where True Love Goes” on An Other Cup), and “Oh Very Young,” and “Jesus,” from Buddha and the Chocolate Box. 

            On 1977’s Izitso, he sings, “(I Never Wanted) To Be a Star,” which has shout outs to “Matthew and Son,” “I’m Gonna Get Me a Gun,” “Bad Night, “ and “I Think I See the Light.” 

            In 1978, Steven Georgiou became Yusuf Islam, and the last Cat Stevens album for almost 30 years came out. He appears to have found what he had been looking for. He wanted to stop recording altogether, but he owed one more album to Island records, which became “Back to Earth.”

            Getting back to “I Think I See the Light,” it’s hard to choose between these two versions. The original reminds me of “Harold and Maude” it’s used in the scene where 20 year old Harold is seen blowing bubbles in 80 year old Maude’s bed after presumably losing his virginity (I know, I know, that description kept me from even giving this movie a chance at the time it came out in 1971. I didn’t see it until 1978, just before I left for Canterbury, England, for summer school (“Year of the Cat”) and if you give it a chance, you’ll find that it’s a great movie, trust me!)

UPDATE: 1/7/14:

            How could I forget the first place where the song is used in “Harold and Maude”? It’s my favorite scene, the appearance of Harold’s first computer date. His mother has answered all the questions for the application as she wishes them to be and when the girl shows up, Harold is seen through the window, in the garden, dressed in flowing robes.

             As his mother interrogates the girl, we (and the girl)can see over the mother’s shoulder as Harold dumps a liquid all over himself and then bursts into flame. The poor girl becomes hysterical, and runs screaming from the room, just as Harold walks calmly through the door to meet her (this is just one of several mock suicides he stages throughout the movie)

             As “I Think I See the Light” begins, Harold stands quietly next to his mother, looking out at us in the audience with a slight smirk on his face, But as he slowly turns his head  he sees his mom glaring at him and he is scared  into submission, instantly wiping the smirk from his face.

            Bud Cort (Harold) is priceless in this scene.

            I like the newer version as well, every time I hear it I remember Yusuf’s appearance on the Colbert Report and Stephen Colbert’s comment to him about how he loves him for coming back and also hates him for depriving us of Cat Stevens for almost 30 years, (I’m paraphrasing here, check it out on YouTube)

            And that’s what makes me tear up a little even now, when I see the YouTube clip, we did lose almost 30 years of music and the new music, not just the re-made songs, are just as good as any Cat did in the day.

            In the big picture view, it’s good to have him back making music.

24 - Mr. Blue Sky – ELO – 1977

Mr. Blue Sky - ELO

Here’s another song that takes me to a specific time and place. Fall of 1977, Macomb, Illinois, where I’m starting my first year of Graduate school in History at Western Illinois University. I’m a grad assistant making the staggering amount of $210 per month for 15 hours of work a week (of course it also is paying all tuition and fees as well). It works out to about $3.50 an hour, but History assistants had very little to do, we didn’t teach 100 level courses like some of the other department’s assistants, like Math. We basically sat in on the 100 level courses and took notes, then made ourselves available for tutoring. I fantasized about an 18 year old coed asking for help but I never was called on to tutor. I also worked for the department chairman and had two major projects: organizing the map room and manually indexing the back issues of the journal published at WIU.

The album, Out of the Blue, was the double album follow-up to New World Record of 1975, which we played the living crap out of at Blackburn. The album also included a cardboard cut out of the UFO on the cover that you folded and placed on a cardboard stand.  Man, I miss albums!

You don’t get anything so cool today, especially if you’re only downloading from itunes or some such vendor.

I was living in Lamoine Village, the Graduate/Married Student housing complex just over the Lamoine River near the WIU campus. Rent was $130 a month, so my $210/month salary left me $80 a month to live on. I learned to make several different dinners based on Spam, or boxes of Mac and Cheese, or Rice-a-Roni (“The San Francisco treat!”) If I was flush and wanted to splurge I would add some ground beef to my Rice-a-Roni.

I even tried making a meal based on salt pork. In doing research on the American Civil War you can’t avoid the numerous descriptions, in almost all the works, of the basic diet of Johnny Reb or Billy Yank of hardtack and salt pork. Hardtack was a biscuit-like substance that sounds like trying to eat a brick. The soldiers tried everything to soften it up, soaking it in their “coffee” or “soup”. It still sounds ghastly.

Salt pork, on the other hand, could be made somewhat edible and so I bought a hunk to see what I could do with it. I first tried cutting it up into smaller chunks and put it in the pea soup my Grandma gave me on one of my trips home. Not bad, chewy, and pretty salty, obviously. The best recipe I found had me dredging it in flour, and then baking it in the oven. What I ended up with was a very juicy pork rind.

I played a lot of Out of the Blue, and New World Record, at WIU. With only $80 to last a month for food and entertainment I rarely went out, other than to movies on campus and a concert with Leo Kottke. Actually, he appeared there twice during my 1.5 years on campus. The first, he opened for Firefall, and I had a class that night and by the time I got to the gym (not a great venue for an acoustic guitar god), he had only 2 or 3 songs left. When he was done so was I.

The next fall he came back as a solo and I saw the complete concert. It was the 3^rd time I had seen him (he played Blackburn College my senior year). He played a smaller venue in the student center and I seem to recall he had some pedals on the floor that he used for bass counterpoint notes, somewhat like the pedals on a church organ. I have never heard or seen Leo or anyone else write about this, and I sometimes think I may have been hallucinating due to lack of food (that’s never been a problem, if you saw me then at 6’5”, 230 lbs, you know that’s not likely.)

In fact, one of my professors referred to me on the day I wore white farmer’s overalls (I had a real look going, no?) as the Pillsbury Dough boy.

This song also reminds me of the several trips home to research the Civil War regiment I was writing about for my Master’s Thesis. I typically traveled down Rt 47 to I-55 to Rt 136 (Home of the Dixie Truck Stop, you couldn’t miss the signs back then) to Macomb. The trip was about 4.75 hours in my 1968 Mustang and I had a tape deck to listen to tapes.

It was a god-awful drive of seemingly unending flatness and I remember one time I was following a pickup towing a horse trailer. It was going slower than the 55 mph speed limit on Rt 136 and I passed it. As I looked in the rearview mirror I saw the truck start swerving back and forth (the driver had been drowsing and when I passed him, it jarred him awake) and I watched in horror as the horse trailer broke free and roll over several times ending up in a ditch.

I stopped and backed up and got there as a young girl got out of the truck hysterically crying about her horse, which was in the trailer, and her father tried to restrain her. We went to the trailer, which I think was on it’s side (this was 35 years ago) and when he opened the door, the horse crawled out and seemed unhurt, other than an eye that was slightly bleeding.

I’m sure he had the ride of is life, and I continued on to Western a little shaken myself.