Was there some news about Cueto?

Works for me.

Max wrote:

Pull that shit on me and I have the counter-punch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWO_AIh8drk

Well done, sir. The actual video is hysterical. Keep in mind this was in the Mezozoic era of music videos and was probably slapped together in about 10 minutes after the song took off, but it consists of C.W. by himself doing a lip synch to the CB radio parts. He doesn't actually sing during the song, so when he's not pretending to talk into the microphone, he just kind of stands there looking very uncomfortable.

Max wrote:

These things form pairs for some reason:

Kung Fu Fighting / Convoy
Billy Don't Be a Hero / The Night Chicago Died

Undercover Angel/Rock Me Gently

This thread wasn't going to last much longer without an Andy Kim reference.

Gotta throw the flag here, J. Golden Earring ain't Pink Floyd, but they were a little bit higher on the musical food chain than most of those crappy bands of the '70s and '80s. The bass line alone in Twilight Zone is better than anything Duran Duran ever did.

So it's  not just me that has a mental model that songs come in pairs?  Here are some others from my youth:

Seasons in the Sun / Cat's in the Cradle
Brandy / Dancing in the Moonlight

And later on:

Der Kommissar / 99 Luft Balloons

Max wrote:

So it's  not just me that has a mental model that songs come in pairs?

Not all the time but often enough to notice.  I've been laughed at plenty for opining that the I Love Lucy and Star Trek themes sound almost the same (can't explain why), but usually it's dissimilar songs bound by a common memory or emotion.  My youth slightly predates yours ("youth" and "predate" being a creepy combination in its own right).  This duo forever will remind me not only of each other, but of walking to school and the smell of a cheap Japanese transistor radio:

My Back Pages/Western Union

And another for which I have a specific visual memory:
The Immigrant Song/Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show.  Don't blame me; blame WLS and the eclecticism of old Top 40 radio.

At this point I started brainstorming and the floodgates opened.  Read on at our shared peril.
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Many simply occupied the same sliver of my childhood and decided to become roommates:
Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye/98.6
Ode To Billy Joe/Harper Valley PTA
Theme From Love Story/If You Could Read My Mind
Reflections Of My Life/Make Me Smile
Smiling Faces (Sometimes)/One Fine Morning
Cracklin' Rosie/Heard It Through The Grapevine (CCR version)
Angie/Knockin' On Heaven's Door
Nice To Be With You/Hold Your Head Up
Beach Baby/You Little Trustmaker

I could go on all day and all of the night but hoping to avoid banishment, I'll stop here except to say that if you think I was (am) lame, be thankful you weren't around when my parents controlled the radio at this particular cookout:
Release Me (or any other late '60s "adult-oriented" ballad)/Abergevenny (a.k.a. "Paradise People", by "Shannon" a.k.a Marty Wilde, daddy of Kim Wilde["Kids In America"] - anyone else who remembers that one will have my unabashed admiration and empathy).

Wow, Doc, I lost track of time.  Same time next week?  What do you mean you "don't think that would be helpful"?  Who the hell am I supposed to talk to now?

"Paradise People", by "Shannon" a.k.a Marty Wilde"

Not to be confused with that "Shannon is gone ..." song with the chorus that ends with a note only small dogs can hear.
Another bad '70s song that makes me want to put my fist through the windshield is that awful "Chevy Van" tripe by Sammy Johns.
One of the bad things about acquiring Sirius radio is every song in every nook in every genre gets played on one of their 200 channels, and if you spin the dial as much as I do, you get to hear them all again. I'm thinking about stocking the car with air sick bags.

artie_fufkin wrote:

"The Immigrant Song/Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show."

Ordinarily, this comparison would make me question your sanity, but my dad was a Diamondhead, and some of his early material doesn't completely suck. Someone did a cover of Brother Love, but I don't remember who.

Your Dad's O.K.  People your age, or maybe a few years older, decided it was sophisticated to turn their nose up to Neil Diamond songs and I only discovered after his best songs could all be collected on a "Greatest Hits" album but I've never stopped enjoying him.  I think he would have had a better image if he'd taken the lead in "A Star is Born #3" instead of that hideous remake of "The Jazz Singer."

And speaking of remakes, I finally managed to pull myself away from watching a movie that I originally boycotted and has now become one of my favorites -- True Grit.  It's always hard to resist not sticking around for the final shootout in the meadow.

Apparently I'm one of the few people of my own age or younger who really liked my parents music as much as the songs that were popular when I was a teen.  In fact, I tend to like that music (of the 40's and early 50's) more with time.

JV wrote:

Max wrote:

JV wrote:

Marty Wilde

One of those 1001 projects that I will probably never get around to doing is to write a history and analysis of the songs of Justin Heyward.  They sound like typical hippie, "peace, love, and understanding" stuff, until one day I caught myself singing the opening lines to "New Horizons":

"Well I've had dreams enough for one, and I've had love enough for three"

And hearing those songs as an adult I immediately interpreted those to indicate a love triangle.  Then, like the scene in the The Sixth Sense, when we suddenly realize that Bruce Willis is dead, and we flashback scene by scene and realize he has been dead for essentially the whole movie, I realized that the bulk of Justin Heyward's songs from "Nights in White Satin" through "Driftwood" were about an illicit love affair with a married woman, and I have a hunch that Marty Wilde could fill in some blanks.  One of the most explicit in this genre is the song, "The Story In Your Eyes".

Wow!  I've been slowly working around to revisiting the Moodys and this will help.  "The Story In Your Eyes" was always one of my favorites of theirs.  Did you ever hear the "Blue Jays" LP Heyward and Lodge released in the late '70s?  It was nothing special, as I recall, but I'd be interested in seeing how well it fits your hypothesis.  An added bonus is the total absence of Graeme Edge's doggerel.

It's not just that lots of his songs seem to be about an impossibly complicated love triangle, but that the progression from 1967 to 1972, and even 1978's "Driftwood" fit more or less perfectly the script of attraction, consummation, problems, catastrophic heartbreak.  Some obvious fits are include the songs below, but if you buy into the hypothesis, you see little signs in almost everything he wrote in that period, e.g. "Never comes the day, for my love and me . . . "

1. 1967's Nights In White Satin, an illicit longing
2. 1969's Lovely to See You, a consumated but secret affair
3. 1971's The Story In Your Eyes, big trouble with a married woman with kids, "But I'm frightened for your children, that the live that we are living is in vain" (used to sound like hippie dippy 'peace, love, and understanding', no?)
4. 1972's Seventh Sojurn, pretty much certain collapse in spite (mal)lingering hope

New Horizons:

http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/New-Horizons-lyrics-Moody-Blues/8051F845E224FACB48256A6A00224156

The Land of Make Believe

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/m/moody+blues/the+land+of+make+believe_20095837.html

I haven't heard Blue Jays; I was afraid it would suck.  But one song from the down years of 1972-1978 fits the hypothesis perfectly.

5. 1978's Forever Autumn, "like the sun through the trees you came to love me, like a leaf on a breeze you blew away, through autumn's golden gown we used to kick our way, you always loved this time of year, loose fallen leaves lie undisturbed now, 'cause you're not here."

This thought, when it hit me, was so obvious that it consumed me a couple of years back.  I had decided that it had to be the wife (with kids) of a man who knew him as a friend.  I started Googling around to see who might possibly have been the woman, if there was any clue in his biography, which in turn led me to send out some emails that were kind of informative in those that were returned and those that were not.

Last edited by Max (12/22/2010 11:51 pm)

artie_fufkin wrote:

... Neil's career never really recovered from that duet with Barbra Streisand.

I'm not sure if this is well-known or not, or maybe it's something that you are aware of.

Diamond and Streisand didn't actually record that song as a duet.  They each had recorded it separately.  In the late 1970's, a Louisville disc jockey named Gary Somethingorother synchronized the two recordings into one and began playing it for a local audience.  The station had a pretty wide reach when and before long it had become a national hit.

We had just arrived in Memphis and my wife was working as Executive Director of the MS Society, which had a fund raising project called "Ugliest Bartender."  Their partner in the venture was what was then the most popular pop music station in Memphis (FM 100) and the station manger was Gary Somethingorother.  My wife mentioned that he had a lawsuit against the record company and Neil Diamond and that he had asked her if he could talk with me about it.  I thought it sounded pretty d.s. and only knew Neil Diamond as just another singer at the time and brushed it off.  I'd not learned to associate him any particular song.  Not too long afterwords, however, we had Gary Somethingorother and his wife over for dinner, along with another couple associated with M.S. 

[Digression:  The woman was a real looker and one of the horniest women I've ever met.  Unfortunately, from the conversation I was having with Somethingorother, she figured out he had a lot more going on than I did.  So she soon re-focused her lusty gaze and I resumed my belief in fidelity.  Ironically, the only thing Somethingorother wanted to talk about was the radio business and his lawsuit.  The last I heard of the hottie was my wife telling that the woman had visited my office and entered into a lengthy discussion with my wife and her secretary as to whether she was behaving improperly by having an affair with her husband's brother.]

I did get to read Diamonds deposition and he freely acknowledged that Somethingorother had been the person who came up with putting the two recordings together.  Not too much later, they settled the litigation and the next thing I knew was that Somethingorother had bought a radio station in Arizona or New Mexico.  That was around 1980.  Not too long after that, I was listening to a New Year's radio station that was playing top hits of the year, on a year by year basis.  When he got to "You Don't Bring Me Flowers," the disc jockey said something about how the song had come about with a disc jockey in Louisville, Ky., named Gary Somethingorother had synchronized the two recordings and started playing the merger over the air in Louisville.

The guy's last name will come to me when I'm watching an episode of NCIS sometime this spring.

Correction:  The visit by the hottie was to my wife's office, not mine.

Last edited by Mags (12/23/2010 4:40 pm)

"The last I heard of the hottie was my wife telling that the woman had visited my office and entered into a lengthy discussion with my wife and her secretary as to whether she was behaving improperly by having an affair with her husband's brother."

If she divorces her husband and marries his brother, does that make her the aunt of her own children?