The title kind of says it all.
While skimming social media this morning I read one passing reference to the 1975 pop music hit “The Hustle” and GUESS WHAT’S BEEN PLAYING ON A LOOP IN MY HEAD EVER SINCE.
Kill me now.
(Warning to those who did not grow up in the 1970s: If you Google “The Hustle” DO NOT LISTEN TO IT. It’s one of those ‘Wheels On The Bus’ songs that never ends. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)
Smoky Robinson’s hit song “Tears of a Clown” sounds like a guy trying to get away with something. “I’m so bummed that you broke up with me. If you see me smiling that’s just me trying to cover up my feelings, I’m actually really sad. And if you see me having a good time at a party? That’s me just pretending. Honestly, I’m not enjoying myself at all, no matter how happy and carefree I look. Totally wrecked, that’s me.”
This garbage heap of grammatical errors was a huge hit as a pop song in the 1980s:
Sometimes I never leave, but sometimes I would
Sometimes I stay too long, sometimes I would
Sometimes it frightens me, sometimes it would
Sometimes I’m all alone and wish that I could
Until suddenly last summer
And then suddenly last summer
If you never leave, that’s called “staying.” You do it continuously. You never stop not leaving. And because you’re always doing it, you are, in effect, doing it just once. You couldn’t do it “sometimes.” If you were “staying” only “sometimes,” you would, by definition, have to leave occasionally.
Which might be what she’s getting at when she adds, “but sometimes I would.” Okay, fine, but then it’s “but sometimes I do.” Either that or the first part is “Sometimes I’d never leave,” which also doesn’t make any sense but at the very least it’s in the right tense. Keep your tenses straight, dammit. Same goes for the second and third lines!
“Sometimes I stay too long” seems a little bit redundant after saying “sometimes I never leave,” don’t you think? I do.
Not sure what frightens her. Never leaving? Or the very redundant staying too long? Something else? Maybe she could be a little more vague? I’m not a huge fan of ambiguity when it comes to pop songs.
“Sometimes I’m all alone” is pretty straightforward, but I have absolutely no freakin clue what she wishes she could. Do. Can’t even take a wild-ass guess. Maybe I’m missing something obvious but I think it’s more likely she’s trying to be mysterious by writing something open-ended and obtuse. Not a fan of that, either.
Speaking of mysterious:
One summer never ends, one summer never began
It keeps me standing still, it takes all my will
And then suddenly last summer
I mean, come on. If it never began, how does it never end? How does that make sense at all? I’m flummoxed.
All that being said, I still like this song. It’s got a really good sound and it reminds me of my college years. What’s not to love about that?
aw, shit.
It’s “come on, eileen tah loo rye yay,” not “come on, eileen tah roo lah ray.” I’ve been singing it wrong all these years. So embarrassing.
Jonny Quest was my all-time favorite Saturday morning cartoon show, and why wouldn’t it be? Jonny was the son of Doctor Benton Quest, a man so smart that the CIA had him under twenty-four hour surveillance every day of the year to protect the secrets in his brain. He went to every corner of the earth to do science and, naturally enough, Jonny went with him and got into all sorts of adventures.
A show like that needed a great big television theme song, and Jonny Quest’s theme song was the best theme song in the history of television theme songs! It opened with a flourish of trumpets, followed by war drums that beat the beat of an excited heart for four measures before a bevy of trombones began to hammer out the base line of the song. There’s hardly been a theme song like it since then. Okay, maybe Hawaii Five-O came close, but it’ll always be in the number two slot.
I was in all the bands during high school, by which I mean, there was just one band, but it was sort of an all-purpose band: marching band, pep band, concert band. When we played at basketball games or other sporting events, we were known as the pep band and we played high-tempo tunes that were arranged to be fast and short.
One of those tunes was “The Horse.” I loved that tune because 1) it sounded amazeballs, and because 2) my part was stupid easy to play. This is what it sounded like when it was arranged for a marching band:
And I was today years old when I learned that it’s not only an R&B number from way back, but it’s also got words!
The Playlist of Awesomeness
I Want You To Want Me – Cheap Trick (Sep 77)
Night Moves – Bob Seger (Nov 76)
Cecelia – Simon & Garfunkel (Apr 70)
Blinded By The Light – Manfred Man (Feb 73)
More Today Than Yesterday – Spiral Staircase (Jan 69)
On the drive into work I tuned in a radio station that was cranking out a playlist that came straight from my high school years.
“I Want You To Want Me” was a song I didn’t appreciate back in high school, which is strange because the lyrics perfectly encapsulate the emotional state I was in back then:
I want you to want me
I need you to need me
I’d love you to love me
I’m begging you to beg me
Feeling all alone without a friend
Y’know you feel like dying
Didn’t I, didn’t I, didn’t I see you crying?
(It’s fine. I was fine. I had plenty of good friends in high school. But I also had an overabundance of emotions and a crushing sense of insecurity. Same as it ever was.)
I can’t help but love this song now. Whenever I find it on the radio, I have to crank up the volume, sing along, and do a little boogey butt dance in my car seat.
“Night Moves” came on next. I was always dimly aware what this song was about, but the atmospherics on this particular morning made the lyrics so clear that there was no way to miss exactly what was going on:
She was a black-haired beauty with big dark eyes
And points of her own, sittin’ way up high
Way up firm and high
After a respectful pause, I posed the question to My Darling B, who has every single one of Bob Seger’s albums: “He’s talking about her titties, right?”
“I think so,” she said, but was not entirely confident in her answer. She had to ask The Google. The answers she got danced around the subject, just like Bob. But I’m about 99% sure that’s what he meant. It was the 70s. That’s what all the songs back then were about.
I was never a huge Bob Seger fan, but his songs were on the radio every day back then. If I were going to make a high school playlist, I would have to include at least a couple of Bob Seger songs, same as I’d have to include Barry Manilow or Olivia-Newton John. Wouldn’t be right to leave that out.
Next up: “Cecelia” by Simon & Garfunkel, a happy-go-lucky song about infidelity. “Cecelia, you’re breaking my heart,” Paul and Simon sing in harmony,
Makin’ love in the afternoon with Cecelia
Up in my bedroom
I got up to wash my face
When I come back to bed, someone’s taken my place
No subtlety there! Just straight-up sexual frustration!
This song was on my favorite Simon & Garfunkel album, “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” which, during my high school years, was everyone’s favorite. Even though it had been released nine years before I graduated from high school, it was nevertheless still enormously popular. For example, everybody I knew had not only memorized the lyrics to “The Boxer,” but also recognized it was a moral imperative to wistfully sing along or at least listen attentively when it was on the radio. “Cecelia” got the same treatment but it was more of a party song so you could enjoy dancing to it, too.
“Blinded By The Light” was another song everyone sang along with even though nobody knew all the words, or even most of the words. After “Blinded by the light,” everybody I knew mouthed some version of “wreck up like a douche under the roamer of the night,” whatever that means. I’m pretty sure that Manfred Man, the band that made this song famous, didn’t know all the words.
And finally, as we were nearing the state office building, we were treated to the glorious wonderfulness that is “More Today Than Yesterday” by forgettable band Spiral Staircase (neither one of us knew that – we had to ask The Google). This is not really a song from my high school days. I was probably dimly aware of its existence and probably heard it on the radio now and then, but as it was released in January 1969 when I was eight years old, I would hardly include it on an ultimate 70s playlist. Still, it rounded out the mornings tunes nicely because it didn’t break the spell of the nearly perfect string of 70s songs they had been spinning.
So I’ve already written more than once about getting a song stuck in my head. Happens to everybody, but I’m pretty sure my brain takes it to an extreme most other people don’t experience. I could be wrong. This belief is not supported by even the tiniest shred of evidence. But it feels absolutely true.
More to the point: I’ve had three Aretha Franklin songs stuck in my head for the past two weeks: “Ain’t No Doubt About It,” “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You,” and “Respect.” My brain’s been stuck on the first one more than the other two, but all three get air time on Radio Dave. Things could be worse, right? Those are three pretty great songs to have stuck in your head, right?
I guess. It’s just that, after two weeks of hearing those three songs on a loop, I have to say that even a fan of Aretha Franklin might get a little burned out. And I like to think of myself as a fan. But as much as I enjoy listening to those songs, I have to admit I’m getting … tired.
I think the songs that get stuck in my head may have a bit to do with how infrequently I listen to my favorite music these days. I used to have a huge collection of record albums close at hand (it’s in storage in the basement now) and listened to them almost all the time. Even if I wasn’t actively listening, I had an album I liked playing in the background. As a result of that, I had a huge loop of songs in my memory. I still occasionally fell into the single-song loop trap, but not for long. And certainly not for two weeks, ever.
I have to admit, though, that I will sometimes go whole days without listening to much of anything anymore, and even then I’ll turn the radio on only to have music in the background. But modern pop music hardly ever gets stuck in my head because I’m not familiar with it. It’s literally just background noise to me. In that respect, pop music is very safe to listen to.
But when I indulge a craving, as I did about two weeks ago, to listen to favorite album (like the Best Of Aretha Franklin I dug out of the archives), I think my brain eagerly latches on to those familiar sounds and obsesses over the details it enjoys or perhaps hadn’t even noticed until just now. “Hey! We haven’t heard this in a while! Oh I love these musical phrases! Wow these lyrics are the best!” And it goes into a seemingly endless loop of re-listening to the bits it loves every waking minute of the day.
Eventually I have to seek therapy by listening to some other old favorite of mine in the hopes that it will bump the previous album out of my phonological loop. Trouble with that is, the relief is temporary. I’ve just replaced one loop with another, so I’ve got, at best, a week of relief, maybe two, before I get really tired of the new loop. So I have to choose carefully. Which album have I not listened to for the longest time? How long can I stand to have it stuck in my head? What if I totally burn out on it and this is the absolute last time I can listen to it? These questions must be carefully considered before I return to the archive to dig up the next album or two.
The song stuck in my head this morning was Abba’s “Take A Chance On Me,” a song I’m not particularly fond of but nevertheless know all the words to. I know all the words to a lot of Abba songs, which is kind of odd because I never turned the radio up when I heard one, I never bought any of their albums, and I don’t even like Abba very much. I think probably I soaked up all the words just because their songs used to be on the radio so often. I mean, like, constantly. Also, it didn’t hurt that I could actually understand them when they sang. I liked Elton John’s music quite a lot but I didn’t know until recently that “Bennie and the Jets” even had words because I couldn’t understand a thing Elton John said, and when I say “understand” I mean it in the sense that he sang like he had a mouthful of marbles, and in the sense that the lyrics to a lot of his songs were nonsensical. The opening lines of “Bennie and the Jets,” for instance, are: “Hey, kids, shake it loose together, the spotlight’s hitting something that’s been known to change the weather, we’ll kill the fatted calf tonight.” Abba, on the other hand, enunciated the words of their songs so clearly, and the words made some kind of sense. “If you change your mind, I’m the first in line, honey I’m still free, take a chance on me” is an opening line that meant something to a lot of teenagers.
My new favorite music video:
This Is Drivel 