Allan Parsons Project

I love it when you take something and turn it into something else. I am not a fan of remakes but when its a poem or a story made into a rock song well then most times you got me. Today was all about transforming something into something new. Alan Parson, producer and mixer extraordinaire, took some of Edgar Alan Poe's greats and put them to a synthetic rock opera. 

One of the great things about records is the cover art for the album's. This particular record is a bit like a story book. There is an entire page about the life and times of Edgar Allan Poe.  Poe was born Jan 19, 1809 in Beantown. When he was born his name was Edgar Poe. He took the Allan when he was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. John Allan when his folks died in 1811. Turns out Poe was a bit of a pervert and he married a thirteen year old girl named Virginia when  he was twenty-seven years old eleven years later she died.  He died at forty years of age and is buried in Baltimore. 

The rest of the inside of the album has a few pages describing each piece and with the lyrics, which are Poe's words, written. I thoroughly enjoyed this piece. It was produced in 1975 which was a bit before the age of synthesizers so Parson and his collaborators were ahead of their time.  

Allan Parsons Project : Tales of Mystery and Imagination of Edgar Allan Poe

• A Dream Within a Dream
• The Raven
• The Tell-Tale Heart
• The Cask of Amontillado
• The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether
• The Fall of the House of Usher
• To One in Paradise

When you get a chance check this record out or any really. Allan Parson Project is like going to the symphony right from home, a rock symphony that is.  I think that Poe would enjoy this. He too was a man ahead of his time and maybe that is part of what made him go insane.

The Glory of Love

Today's selection is an artist I had never heard of and when the first song came on I thought I was listening to a male Anne Murray.  But for Love sounded like Snowbird to me with a nice banjo in the back ground. The melodies are simple and quiet which can be refreshing but with his smooth Anne Murray or Conway Twitty voice I really just felt like going to sleep. 

The Glory of Love Eddie Arnold....1969

• But for Love
• You Gave Me a Mountain
• Then She's a Lover
• Heaven Below
• Just a Bend in the Road
• As Long As I Love
• Town and Country
• Sweet Bird of Youth
• The Glory of Love
• Faithfully
• The Song of Long Ago

I was just about to slit my own wrists rather than continue this record until Glory of Love came on. I still think that Bette Midler does a better rendition of it but at least this song sounded different than the rest on the record. 

The lesson this record taught me "You've got to win a little lose a little and always have the blues a little
That's the story of that's the glory of love". This fit my mood for the day when I reflect on love lost and won there are days I think I wish I had not gone through this or that but at the end of the day, love is not having a choice it's the good the bad and the ugly. That's the glory of it all.

Ballad of the Green Berets and Songs of Americas Fighting Men

What is patriotism to you? The extreme right has seemed to commandeer all of the symbols of patriotism and taken a "if you're not with us your against us" fascist stance.  Waving the American Flag has come to mean you love your country even if you spew words of hate and war mongering. This breaks my heart. I am no less a patriot because I do not support war and killing for mindless reasons. 

This is a constant struggle for me because my friends on the right think I am un-American because I oppose war. My friends on the far left sometimes think I am not really committed to the cause because I still support the individual men and women who make up our US military force.  This age old battle leaves true patriots in limbo. That's not to say I am more patriotic then the next person but  I think there are thousands of people out there just like me who's voice never really gets heard. We are forced to chose one side or the other and sadly many choose the side to the right. Blind patriotism is just as dangerous as having no patriotism at all. 

To me patriotism is having the courage to stand up for what you believe in. To love your country enough to want to change the things that need changing. To stand, like our forefathers, in the face of adversity and say fuck you controlling freaks you're not gonna tell me how to live my life anymore. So I say fuck you to this war in Iraq and have since the beginning. This does not make me unpatriotic, it does not make me un-American, it does not mean I wish the men and women, many of who are my friends and loved ones, to be harmed or poorly treated. It simply means that I do not think we should be over there fighting.  To that end I have done everything in my power to convince the people in power and my friends and allies that in some smart way this war has to end. I think dissent is the purest form of patriotism. 

Why is this question of patriotism coming up today? Today's record of course. Today was "Ballad of the Green Berets and Songs of Americas Fighting Men".  All of the songs were pretty gun ho military and war but there was an odd ray of hope for me in this nine song album. The very last song on side two was "Ain't Gonna Study War No More" This is one of the battle cries of the anti-war movement and here it was on a record that seemed to be glorifying war. This forced me to listen to the entire record one more time and really listen to the words this time. What i realized was that for the most part this record epitomized my feelings on war and patriotism. There was on one lyric that was gun ho war most of them were talking about the individual soldiers who were simply doing their job and coming home in pine boxes.  It served as a reminder the power of symbols and how its time for us to take back our symbols and our music and make it what it really stands for. 

Ballad of the Green Berets

•                 Ballad of the Green Berets
•                 When This Cruel War is Over
•                 The USA
•                 When Johnny Comes Marching Home
•                 LBJ and Liberty
•                 The Truth is Marching On
•                 Fight No More
•                 Over in Vietnam
•                 Aint Gonna Study War No More

               

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -Edward Abby

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it.- Mark Twain

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. -Howard Zinn

You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism you can't face reality. What's wrong is wrong, no matter who says it. -Malcolm X

Aerosmith Live....Bootleg

Like most new year's resolutions I almost blew this one today. I have been struggling with yet another headache for most of the day. Funny how most of my life I dealt with the headaches and have always just accepted it as part of who I am but recently they have begun to frustrate me to no end.  I am pissed off that I have the heart, will and sprit to keep fighting the good fight and my body keeps arguing with me at every step. Some days it's just so damn hard to put up with. Maybe today's record was a perfect choice after all. 

I sat here feeling sorry for myself avoiding the task I had set forth and the I grabbed my proverbial boot straps,  settled into my new rocking chair and put on side one of a two record set. As Stephen Tyler screamed "Back in the Saddle" at me my eyes closed and I groaned. It's a live version so there is a lot of background noise which the part of me that doesn't have a migraine appreciates.  There is something very energizing about music done live. This was no exception.  It's time for me to get back in the saddle again in some form or fashion. So my body objects, time to stop using that as an excuse. I have never been one to make excuses for my behavior, always owned up to the mistakes or successes I have made in this life. For the past ten months since I was forced to quit working that has not been true. I have hidden myself away from those who care about me and though most of the time I was really not feeling well due to my disease, there were times I quite frankly was just too damn pissed off at the world and my fate to talk to another living soul. There are weeks I don't even leave the house. That is not the fighting Serena I know so well.  I think truthfully that is part of what this project is about. I am used to routine, it's how I get buy in my life and that routine was taken from me ten months ago and I didn't know what to do with myself. So I got up and am now with headache squinted eyes smiling as I listen to a 1978 album of Aerosmith. 

Sometimes ones senses become a lil skewed when the head feels like it's about to burst. It wasn't until side two of the second record that I realized I wasn't imagining things that the record really was warped. Not beyond recognition but when "Walk This Way" sounded a bit like it was in a wind tunnel or like the teachers on Peanuts, it occurred to me to look at the record and as the needle made its way over the black vinyl like it was doing a slow dance over the hills of a volcano prairie all I could do was laugh. Luckily for me the second record though slightly warped was not the rolling hill the other one was and Dream On, my favorite song on both records, was nearly perfect. I had never heard it live before. This one was done live and recorded in Louisville KY on July 3, 1977. I was nearly a year old. Funny how this song has been one of my favorites my entire life. 

Aerosmith Bootleg

• Back in the Saddle
• Sweet Emotion
• Lord of the Thighs
• Toys in the Attic
• Last Child
• Come Together
• Walk this way
• Sick as a Dog
• Dream On
• Chip Away the Stone
• Sight for Sore Eyes
• Mama Kin
• SOS
• I Aint Got You
• Mother Popcorn
• Train Kept A Rollin

Today's lesson brought to me by Stephen Tyler. Get back in the saddle, Dream On, Walk this Way Cause the Train Kept a Rollin.

Alabama The Closer You Get

For a great number of years I have got up on Sunday mornings and listened to the Sunday morning country oldies show. Here in eastern Connecticut they do things a bit differently. The Sunday morning country oldies show is combined with a live flea market. People call in and can sell up to three items on the air. It's pretty entertaining actually, in the summertime the market is full of people advertising their garage, or as it's called here, tag sales.  

Anyhow the point of that is today's record.  Today's record is from the country collection and its an LP from Alabama. "The Closer You Get". I sat here sort of chuckling that they actually are often played on the country oldies show. I always grumble a lil bit and say "that's not classic country" it was produced in my lifetime, 1983, seven years old and certainly old enough to like and understand real music. How can something made in my lifetime be classic? Oh right that was twenty eight years ago. I guess time is passing me by and I don't even realize it sometimes. To be fair though I really think that radio stations should really wait till a piece of music is well over 40 years old to call it classic and even then as i stare down the barrel of turning forty, that may be too young. 

Alabama "The Closer You Get" song list.

•                 The Closer You Get
•                 Lady Down on Love
•                 She Put the Sad in All His Songs
•                 Red River
•                 What in the Name of Love
•                 Dixieland Delight
•                 Very Special Love
•                 Dixie Boy
•                 Alabama Sky
•                 Lovin Man

This seems to be a record about love gained, lost and remembered. Overall pretty sad piece of vinyl. There are some good songs many that are well known some I had never heard before. Most of them sound pretty similar. "She put the sad in All His Songs" was a new listen for me. I got a hallow feeling in my chest when it came on. The point of the song is this barroom guitar picker meets a woman who changes his life one day and he falls head over heels changes his drinkin whorin ways. "She took what he had and she made it wrong." Which would have been fine if he got the girl in the end but he didn't. So he was left yearning for his old life but feeling like he couldn't live it anymore because without her it didn't feel right.  She however: " She was the rattle snake that bit him. She was the blow from up behind. She thought the tear in his eye just might fit him, and he was the last thing on her mind." In the end his love was unrequited and he like the lady in the previous song "Lady down on love" was left all alone and trying to find a path in the world again.  I think that is a truth that most don't realize when they are in the midst of heartache. Very very rarely do either parties walk away unscathed. It takes two to make something work and it takes two to screw it up. It's always worked that way. Even if your partner cheats on you, cardinal sin yes, but there was something you needed to improve in that relationship too. It's a lesson I learned the hard way and I, like so many others, would change things if i could but not to stop the course of direction life took but simply to change the heartache caused.  But maybe like the Who's in Whooville whose Christmas spirit didn't come from shiny packages, ones person doesn't come from the shiny moments in life, but the moments instead that broke your heart and left you feeling like you would never love or breathe again.

The Columbia Album of Irving Berlin Volume One

So today is the first day of my new habit. Blogging and listening to records. I figured if you combine two things one you love and one you don't into an activity perhaps you will be able to create a new habit one you like. I sorted my records today and I have in the neighborhood of four hundred. This year it is my goal to listen to one record a day and review the experience here for any and all to read.

My records are divided by genera. Big Band/Classical, Children's, Country, and Rock of all sorts as well as holiday music but you have a whole year to wait for those since they will be the last I review. Each day I will take an album from a different genera and work our way through them systematically. Today I started with Big Band/Classical since it was on the top shelf. The first record I chose was " The Columbia Album of Irving Berlin Volume One" Below is the list of songs on the record.

• 1. It's a lovely day
• 2. Maybe its because i love you to much
• 3. You'd be surprised
• 4. Always
• 5. Shakin the blues away
• 6. There's no business like show business
• 7. Say it with music
• 8. It's a lovely Day tomorrow
• 9. This year's kisses
• 10. Lady of the Evening
• 11. Steppin out with my baby
• 12. Let's face the music and Dance

The strings started the first song It's a Lovely Day and i was transported. It was a mix of lovely day and Blue skies. Instantly made me smile all instrumental of course. Dark chocolate eyes closed and I was in a time long lost where girls wore big dresses, think Mary Poppins not Scarlett O'Hara here. Julie Andrews and Dick Vandyke were dancing their way through a lush green meadow. A waltz of course. Dancing, ballroom that is, seemed to be a lost art form until it became main stream with Dancing with the Stars again. I have never been to light on my feet how i made it through years of dancing in high school musicals is beyond me. Somehow our theater "mom" Ms. A always found my step, her and a whole host of the Shoestring Community Directors. I have been telling myself for years that i was going to take ballroom dancing lessons. Mayhap this year i will be inspired to actually find a class and pay for it at one of the community learning centers here in town.

Just when i am about to get lost in the land of melancholy the beat suddenly picks up with song number five Shakin the Blues Away. Quite an appropriate name for the feeling of gladness that suddenly erupts in my heart and I can't help but chair dance feet tapping and fingers flying across the keyboard, head bopping wishing I was Ginger Rogers dancing with Fred Astaire. I was once in a musical at the Warren Baptist Church called Antsillvania. There was a song that sounded very much like this one and I remember always grinning when that song came up in rehearsal. I hardly remembered even doing anything for the choir of that church since i was never a member there. I wonder how I got started in all of that. -laughs- I remember that is where i met Bart, he was the music director for the show. I must have been about nine maybe ten i would think.

Side two starts with Say it to Music which streams into Dancing Cheek to Cheek. When was the last time you danced cheek to cheek with someone? I think the last time was at my wedding two years ago and we stumbled our way through it but what a nice way to be close to someone. Even if you can't dance well just being held in the safety of someone's embrace makes a person feel treasured and loved in a way very few things can. My great grandparents loved to dance. Right up until the end of their sixty-seven year marriage they were dancing like they were made only to glide across the floor in each other's arms.

Overall really great record and I highly recommend it. It's a good way to remind yourselves of a simpler time. Though I suspect if you asked people alive during that time, when it was happening, they may not have agreed it was a simpler time. Things get harder and harder it seems but when you're in the midst of it it's hard to see the forest through the trees. Everything feels like it's the worst it's going to get but as each generation reflects back things suddenly seem easier and simpler. Does that mean the world is getting crazier and we as humans keep coming up with new ways to torment ourselves and each other? Maybe, one thing is certain though as long as we preserve our music we can be transported to a time when things did not seem so hard and all you had to worry about was stepping on your partners toes.

Electronic Diaries are Diaries Still

When i was a teenager I attempted to keep a diary like many young girls do. I always sucked at it. I would sit there fully focused before bed and determined to solidify my life in my own personal history book. As the pen would descend on the blank pages ready to be brilliant it would scribble what ever popped to mind which typically was not very much. In the end what would be on the page would be really rather mundane. Long story short, many pages of what i ate for lunch that day and who i had a crush on at that moment. BORING.

I once learned the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

My trying to keep a diary, as a kid and as an adult, is the very definition of insanity. I would go months and sometimes years without writing and then when i finally felt the urge i had this overwhelming sense of obligation to catch my blank diary up on all the important events in my life since the last time i wrote. This exercise would be so exhausting that i would finish and say damn ok i cant go that long again but what a pain and so more months or years would pass before I wrote again.

What you may ask is the point of this one am rambling? Well as you can see well over a year ago i started this blog with every intention to write regularly like i had every intention of journaling in a diary all those failed attempts. As you can see by the scarcity of posts, that also has not come to furition.

The thing that prompted this post is me having another one of those ah-ha moments. Life is short and somedays i feel just how short and how precious life is and so i get rather introspective. Today was one such day. I realized as i sat there watching Harry Potter number one, that unlike Harry, I know where I come from and from who. I have some very amazing and interesting characters in my life, myself being one. I have done some really amazing things in my life that someday maybe someone would like to know about so instead of a journal i have decided that when i remember a story i will write it down for posterity sake and for my own cause with each passing day my memory gets more and more hazy.