89- Going Home –Theme from Local Hero – Mark Knopfler – 1983

Going Home - Theme from Local Hero

            Another great Mark Knopfler song, from the cult favorite, “Local Hero”. Like the best of Knopfler’s work (see # 60 - On Any Street), it starts slow and quiet, and then builds to a big finish, with a great hook.

            “Local Hero” is the story of an American yuppie from Houston, played by Peter Reigert, Boon of “Animal House”, who is sent by the owner of the oil company he works for, Burt Lancaster, to purchase the land around a bay on the Northern coast of Scotland, to turn it into a refinery for the company’s North Sea oil.

            He comes to fall in love with the town and its people, but in the end, like other Bill Forsyth comedies, the end is bittersweet, and he ends up back in Houston, calling the single phone in the town, a pay phone outside the pub, and listening to it ring and ring and ring and ring, as Mark Knopfler’s theme wells up.

            I love the work of Bill Forsyth, especially the largely unseen “Comfort and Joy.” Quirky, as a description of his films, is surely an understatement. “Comfort and Joy” is the story of an ice cream war, between the ice cream trucks of Mr. Bunny and Mr. McCool, and the disc jockey that gets caught in the middle.

            The scene that made me laugh the most, and it’s just a throwaway, is the one where you see one of the ice cream truck employees making the music to be played over the truck’s PA. Instead of recording it once, and making an audio loop, they are actually making a tape with the innocuous, tinkling music, punctuated with “Hello, Kids!” over and over and over.

88 – Birdhouse in Your Soul – They Might Be Giants -1990

Birdhouse in Your Soul -Official Video

                Here’s another group I cannot remember where or how I heard of them. It may have been that WXRT (Chicago’s Finest Rock) played this song and I was intrigued. I bought the CD “Flood” in 1991 right around the time I took a job with Chicago Etching Corporation and was about to embark on my longest commute to that time. For the first two months I tried mass transit from Elgin to North and Sheffield on Chicago’s North side.

                I would leave the house around 6:15 to drive down to the Elgin Metra station to get the 6:25 to Chicago. I rode the train all the way to the Western Avenue stop where I would get off and walk the block or so to the Western Ave. bus stop to await a northbound bus. After several minutes a bus would come, I would get on and ride north until it got to North Ave. At North Ave. I would get off and cross two streets to get to the stop for the eastbound bus. I would then ride the eastbound bus to Sheffield, where I got off and walked the half block to Chicago Etching. If I was lucky, and hit the busses just right, I would get to work by 8AM. If the busses were overloaded (and then wouldn’t stop at all) or were running slowly, I would get in around 8:15-8:20 AM.

                After doing this commute for a couple months, I talked the President, Dick Golden, one of the nicest bosses I’ve ever had, into letting me come in around 7:00 AM, so I could drive in before the morning rush, leaving my house about 6 AM. Then I would leave around 4 PM or so, and get caught in the afternoon rush.

                The soundtrack to my commute on the train/buses was “Flood”, along with the album on the “B” side of my cassette, Mike Oldfield’s “Islands” I had a cassette player/FM radio combo that I listened to.

                One day the doors of a bus closed on the player, hanging from my hip pocket, and “Poof”, it was gone. I stood on the steps of the bus as it pulled away from the curb, headphones still on my head, strangely quiet all of a sudden, cord dangling over my shoulder, dopey look on my face. “Wha….?”

                When I listen to TMBG, I always ruminate on how much money they should have made. I think, “I wonder which show theme music makes them the most residuals?” TMBG wrote the themes for: The Daily Show on Comedy Central, which was usually shown 4-5 times a day; the theme for “Malcolm in the Middle” (You’re Not the Boss of Me); and two songs played on every episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, (“Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” and “Hot Dog”)

                Did you know that Mickey’s first words in his first talking cartoon were “Hot dog, Hot dog”, voiced by Walt Disney himself? Me neither, I’ve been reading a great biography of Walt Disney by Neal Gabler.  

               Also, when this song ("Birdhouse...") was used in "Pushing Daisies", sung by Kristin Chennoweth and Ellen Greene, it cemented my love for that quirky show.

               And the line where they sing: "There's a picture opposite me/ Of my primitive ancestry/ which stood on rocky shores and kept the beaches shipwreck free/Though I respect that a lot/I'd be fired if that were my job/After killing Jason off and countless screaming argonauts" always makes me laugh for some strange reason.

87 – Sun/C79 – Cat Stevens – 1974

Sun/C79 - Cat Stevens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World - Video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was exhausted, yet exhilarated.

85 – Sirens of Titan – Al Stewart – 1975

Sirens of Titan - Al Stewart

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

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

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

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

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

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