62 – You Can Call Me Al – Paul Simon – 1986

You Can Call Me Al - Paul Simon

A song from Paul Simon’s “Graceland” album that always reminds me of the video that was released, starring Chevy Chase, animatedly mouthing the lyrics as Paul Simon morosely lurked in the background, playing various instruments such as the bass guitar and conga drums.

It also reminds me of a concert Lynn and I attended in 1992, during Simon’s “Born at the Right Time” tour, at the Rosemont Horizon (now the Allstate Arena). The stage was on our left so the majority of the sound pounded my left eardrum. 

And it was loud (which many people later marveled at when I told them, they thought of Paul Simon as the “Sounds of Silence”, “Scarborough Fair” guy, even though the new albums were very percussion driven)

The next day I noticed my ears were still ringing, especially my left.

When it didn’t abate after several days, I made an appointment with my primary doctor and he sent me to an ear, nose, and throat specialist, who performed a hearing test. It was then that I found out I had lost upper register hearing, due to running punch press for 6 months in my early working career at Accutronics, in those wonderful pre-OSHA days when we didn’t wear any hearing protection (and none was offered).

The ringing has never stopped, I just don’t notice it until I’m in a quiet area, or are sick, when it becomes hard not to think about the constant tone.

I’ve gotten used to it, I guess.

My doctor also found I had an enlarged thyroid on the right side of my throat and I ended up having half of it removed, requiring me to take synthroid forever to make up for the missing half.

           That’s a lot of medical memories linked to a fairly upbeat song

61 – Good Vibrations – 1966

Good Vibrations form "Pet Sounds" sessions

            One of my favorite Beach Boys compositions, Brian Wilson’s most creative work, done when he was all of 24. I have three versions on the Zune. One is the original version, the second a re-working by Brian in 2004 for his recreation of the “Smile” album, and the third an instrumental version from the “Pet Sounds Sessions” CD set.

            I received the 45 of this song for my birthday in 1966 (my 12^th) and played it over and over, I loved all the changes that took place during its 3 ½ minutes.

            I particularly enjoy listening to the version from the “Pet Sounds Sessions” CD, because it strips the vocals from the track and illustrates how beautifully Brian Wilson built the song.

            You hear the guitar, Hammond Organ, tamborine, then the drums come in, along with the Theremin and bass, and finally, the sleigh bells!!

            As the Wikipedia entry so eloquently describes it, the song was put together by “…recording and re-recording…specific sections of music, followed by rough mixes of the sections edited together, further recording as required, and the construction of the final mix from the component elements…The various sections of the song were edited together by Wilson into an innumerable amount of sound collages, and its production spanned 17 recording sessions at four different recording studios. The recording is reported to have used over 90 hours of magnetic recording tape, with an eventual budget estimated between $50,000 and $75,000 ($360,000 - $ 550,000 today).”

            “Pet Sounds”, the whole album, had cost $70,000.

            Hearing the 45 version, I am reminded of the one birthday party I had growing up. Birthday’s weren’t the event, in my circle of friends (or anywhere back then), like they are today when you and your kid are judged by the party you put on for them.

            It was probably my 11th birthday, 1965, I had invited 3-4 guys over to go to see the latest Jerry Lewis movie, “The Disorderly Orderly,” at the Dundee Main Street Theater, the closest to Algonquin back then.  

            We piled into our Dodge Valiant station wagon and my mom drove us to the theater and when we got there we found that the movie had changed and so we saw “King Kong vs Godzilla.”

Quite the disappointment as I recall.

60 - On Every Street – Dire Straits – 1991

On Every Street - Dire Straits 

     This song has one of Mark Knopfler’s best riffs (or is it a refrain?) in a career full of great ones. It’s from Dire Straits’ last album and, like many of his songs, it builds slowly. After the verses are sung, his guitar plays 10 single notes, once, twice, then a little drum comes in and it repeats a couple more times, then it repeats (sounds dull, but give it a listen) and adds instruments (even some cowbell at one point, I think!), then he adds a little slide guitar and the bass comes in and it builds into a rollicking, ..and it fades…. 

     I can listen to this over and over. Lynn likes it, too.

     It reminds me of the Christmas in 1991 when I asked for this album from Lynn’s mom as my X-mas present.

     It also reminds me of the X-mas when we had a round robin gift giving (I don’t think that’s the name for it, but I’m 60 now, an old man). Everybody brought a gift and then we sat in my brother in law Dave’s Chicago “bachelor” pad and took turns either taking a gift or passing yours to someone else, taking theirs.

     Everybody seemed to end up with their own gift, as I recall, and I was happy because I ended up with the DVD of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”. At the time, we were the only ones with a DVD player so I guess I knew what I’d end up with.

59 – World Turning – Leo Kottke – 1997

World Turning - Leo Kottke 

This is Kottke’s cover of Lindsay Buckingham’s song from his Fleetwood Mac days, and like the other covers by Leo on my Zune, I prefer his to the original. It has a great vocal and Kottke plays a little sitar on it as well.

I was not a big Fleetwood Mac guy, though I feel that Lindsay Buckingham is one of the great guitarists, up there with Leo and John Fahey, as a finger picker. One of my favorite albums is “Out of the Cradle,” which begins with a 25 second instrumental which showcases his virtuosity.

I’m thinking back to 1997 when this song came out and the main memory it brings is my short stint at Ibiden Printed Circuits, a Japanese owned company about a mile from our house here in Elgin. I left Tingstol, which was in Elk Grove Village (about a mile from where I work now), for a chance to work closer to home, but had never worked for the Japanese before (or since).

When I got there they said I needed a passport, because at some point  I would be sent to Japan to work in the main plant  for several weeks to learn how to do it their way. After a couple weeks I was told that Hitachi was coming in for an audit and we had to get ready in one week. I looked at the documentation they had on file and saw everything was translated from Japanese into English, but not easily readable in that it was too literal.

I saw that we were trying to get ready for a full blown ISO audit in one week, which is kinda crazy and I told the Japanese president it would be impossible to do so. His response was, “But we must try.”

And try we did, I worked several night until midnight or one AM (starting at 8 AM), translating the literal English into readable English, line-by-line, then going in to the president’s office and discuss whether I had got the true meaning of the sentence.

At 10PM each night the whole shebang would come to a halt as they (all the Japanese managers) would go into the president’s office and call the Japanese plant since it was 8AM there. Other Japanese office workers could not leave until the president did, so they actually slept at their desks as these all-nighters went on.

When the audit occurred, we failed and I saw more frustrations like this on the horizon, along with that totally unsupervised trip to Japan that loomed ahead.

So I did something I have never done, before or since. After calling my old boss at Tingstol, to make sure I had a job to go back to, I waited one morning until the 9AM production meeting started and I took a box, swept everything from my desk into it, and walked out the door. I went home and told my wife not to answer the phone and I never went back.

I’m not proud of that moment, but I have never felt so frustrated and lost with any job I’ve ever taken on.

Heeeeee’s Baaaaack!

           Well, that was a nice little break there!

It’s been quite the time out at the Kammrad Manse, the past 5 months. Let’s see, what happened…got the ceiling fixed in our bedroom, then in July Lynn went in to Cancer Treatment Centers for a hysterectomy and several days after being released, almost bled to death at Sherman Hospital when CTCA sent her to the ER at Sherman and they stuck her in a room and left her for several hours, never checking on her, until she felt herself losing consciousness and called in a nurse who found her bleeding out and it took 2 pints of blood to get her back. Nice!

She still is exhausted throughout much of her day and needs 9-10 hours of sleep a night to get through it.

Summer was nice. We belong to a community pool (in our backyard, it was part of our property when the house was built in the 50’s) and it was nice to go over with the kids and sit after work.

As summer wound down, Lynn decided to use some of the money she got from her mom and dad, so we bought a small hot tub and a gazebo to put it in. We had them delivered and set up on the cement pad patio in the front of our house and when I went to get the permit for the electrical work, found that because of how our house is situated on a corner lot, we couldn’t have either the hot tub, or the gazebo anywhere in front of our house.

We called the Great Escape to move them, they said sure, for $600, When the moving day came they said they couldn’t move the gazebo because the slab of concrete in back of our house (part of a full court basketball court that had cracked and settled over the past 60 years) was not level.

Luckily, the company doing the electrical work has a construction division and they moved the tub and gazebo for the same $600. All they had to do was shim one corner of the gazebo; the vast majority of the slab was level.

So now we go to the hot tub 4-5 days a week. Very nice after a long day at work. And the relaxation extends to my time after the kids go to bed and I can take notes for this blog, so without further ado…