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Not too much to report this evening. It was a fairly busy day on the job. Peer support certainly does not lack for drama!
I didn't know what to post tonight until I read some sad news. Bill Fries passed away a few days ago at the age of 94. He was an ad executive who started acting in his own commercials as the
character he created, C.W. McCall. Then he decided to have his fictional
character become a singer and he sang about life as a trucker.
So he
was an executive pretending to be an actor who was pretending to be a
singer who was pretending to be a trucker. That's a lot of mileage out
of one character!
In memory of Bill Fries aka C.W. McCall, and in honor of all the one-hit wonders of the Seventies, here is "Convoy":
Two and a half days later and Rush Limbaugh's absence from the airwaves continues to haunt. I tried calculating how many hours I listened to him over the years, and couldn't do it. From summer of 1992 until I started college at Elon three years, I was listening to him at least nine hours a week. In the past few years I sort-of rediscovered him and listened as much as possible. There was none like him before, nobody compared when he was with us, and it is doubtful that anyone will ever really succeed him.
It wasn't just his brilliant commentary, it was also the hysterically funny comedy that was a huge part of Limbaugh's show. Especially the song parodies. Most of them came courtesy of a chap named Paul Shanklin. There were a few others also. I remember one guy who was in the Bay Area. Another was from Massachusetts.
So in Rush's memory I thought it would be appropriate to share some of the song parodies and other material that he played on his show.
I forget who made this one. It might have been Shanklin. "The Philanderer", a spoof of "The Wanderer":
"In A Yugo", parody of Elvis Presley's "In The Ghetto":
This next one is a clip from "Weird Al" Yankovic's movie UHF, Rush played it on his show every so often. The commercial for Spatula City:
One of my personal favorites: "They're Coming To Take Ross Away", a parody of "They're Coming To Take Me Away" by Napoleon XIV. And I liked Ross Perot!
The Barnacle Brothers 60-Second Sale spot:
And finally (but far from the only remaining parody that Rush did on his show), "Al Gore Paradise", a send-up of Coolio's "Gangsta Paradise":
This past week was the thirtieth anniversary of the release of "We Are The World": the multi-multi-multi-talented collaboration of most of the biggest stars during the era. It was a song to inspire relief from hunger in Africa. Recording legend Quincy Jones miraculously corralled all of that musical force in the wee hours of the night right after the American Music Awards had wrapped. The result? Still a monument to pop culture at its best.
Something we'll probably never see the likes of again.
Rolling Stone has published an astounding account, practically moment-by-moment, of the night that Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Kenny Rogers, Diana Ross, Paul Simon, Cindy Lauper, Willie Nelson and 40-some of their closest friends (who also had Dan Ackroyd among them, strangely) came together to record the song. There is some really crazy material here. My favorite is probably the heated argument, at 1 a.m., between Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles (several hours after Wonder escorted Charles to the restroom in a true "blind leading the blind" moment). This was just about everybody who was major on the music scene at the time (except for Prince, whose conspicuous absence is remarked upon in the article).
Can you imagine something like this happening today? We'd probably have Taylor Swift, Garth Brooks, Hozier, Lorde and maybe even "Weird Al" Yankovic along with dozens of others in the same studio. Personally, I can't see that. What can be said? It was the Eighties. This is a product of that era. And one well worth remembering.
I held off on listening to anything from Howard Shore's score for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey until my grubby lil' paws had hold of the soundtrack CD when it was released on Tuesday. I went for the collector's edition, which has extra tracks, lots of nifty pictures and a bunch of liner notes about Shore's return to the music of Middle-Earth.
So all the cool kids knew about this song already (it was released on the Intertubes a few weeks ago) but the track I've playing like crazy over and over again from this score is "Song of the Lonely Mountain", performed by Neil Finn.
This is what'll presumably be playing when the end credits roll on the first part of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy.
"Beautiful" doesn't begin to do it justice. Now I loved the songs that played over the credits of each of The Lord of the Rings films (I've remarked a few times over the years - maybe a bit seriously - that the perfect song to have played at my eventual funeral should be "Into the West" by Annie Lennox from The Return of the King). But "Song of the Lonely Mountain" more than any other that has been produced for Jackson's Tolkien-ish movies... this seems even more appropriate in tone for the story at hand. It's exactly what I imagined Bilbo was feeling, when I first read The Hobbit many years ago, when he listened to the dwarves singing about heading off to reclaim their rightful kingdom from terrible Smaug. Hearing their words, finding one's self listing off to far away mountains and forests and treasures... and adventure.
No wonder Bilbo went running off into the wild. Heck, after listening to a song like this, I would too! If there were any more wild to run off into... sigh.
And the rest of the soundtrack is awesome too! "Blunt the Knives" is the sort of song that I would sing if I were drunk. Which I'm not a drinking man anyway. But If I were I would sing "Blunt the Knives". Anyhoo...
So looking forward to seeing this movie!! That won't come until Saturday. In the meantime, this album is gonna be spinnin' away like mad on my stereo!
It was on November 10th, 1975 that the Edmund Fitzgerald, the largest ship on the Great Lakes, sank into the depths of Superior. She carried twenty-nine men down with her.
The following year, Gordon Lightfoot recorded what is almost certainly his best-known song. It's also one of my personal favorites, and when I found this on YouTube I had to post it here too.
Accompanied by video and photos from her construction on through her tragic end and beyond, here is "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"...
In retrospect of the long and curious journey of my spiritual life, I can see now how my seeking after God has been a quest that has taken the majority of my years on this Earth. But it was only sixteen years ago when that seeking coalesced and crystallized into a choice to follow after Christ.
As with many things however, those first few years were, well... interesting, to put it mildly. Downright strange and bizarre in fact. Yeah bizarre even by my own standards...
But the Lord provides. And He sustains. Always. Sometimes in ways that we can't fully appreciate until a long time later, and that is certainly what I have found in recent years especially.
Something that was an encouragement for me during those first few years were the brothers and sisters at Elon College's InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Every Tuesday night was an evening of praise and worship and for some reason or another they even tolerated a fallen and frail guy like me. Helped me, even. A lot. Well, there was a bunch of singing those nights, and waaaay back in 1998 there was a whole night's "recording session" of those songs. Over the years the tapes were converted into MP3 files for digital dispersal among friends. I've been carrying them around on my iPod for more than six years now. When I went through an especially rough patch two years ago, these songs became one of the few things that helped me hold onto God's promise that the darkness would end. So, I can readily attest that there's some uplifting material here.
Geoff Gentry, not just a true brother in the Lord but an all-around kewl dude and techno-wunderkind, has made ALL of those recordings available on his website! There are two zipped-up files to download: one is the "main" body of 29 songs and then there's a "bonus" archive with 6 songs. My voice is somewhere in the larger collection but it's (thankfully) drowned out by those of much better singers. Anyhoo, these have been a blessing to me over the years and if you need something uplifting, maybe they can be a blessing to you too.
I told y'all that I've been quite busy lately. So much so that I'm sadly lacking in recent pop culture.
Take f'rinstance, "Red Solo Cup" by Toby Keith: a song that I did not know anything about the existence of until a few nights ago when Dad and I were driving back from dinner in Greensboro. I had to turn the volume up to make sure I was really hearing what I thought I was hearing. Before very long, Dad and I were both cracking up laughing!
Except now... this song is stuck in my brain and it refuses to leave!!
Maybe if I post the music video for it, that will help to exorcise this particular demon. So here it is: "Red Solo Cup"...
