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.