The 1970s and the Wonders of Time and Music

I’m going to a 1970’s-themed party tonight with my wife and a group of close friends.

Sounds like fun, sure, and it will be. For people in my age group, the 1970s was the time when we first opened our eyes to the world, fed to us on 19-inch Zenith color television consoles set on shag carpets in our parents’ living room by the pop culture media of the day before the three networks and two independents signed off shortly after midnight and the TV fizzled to a multi-colored test pattern or silvery static.

Hell, if you were first exposed to life in the early 1970s, you thought avocado green was an actual basic color.

The central unifying theme for my group of friends is music. The key element of any of our theme parties is the music. We bring a disc of five songs each, shuffle ’em and play ’em randomly, while we guess who picked that song. Ha, imagine that: a bunch of songs we first heard on AM radio or on 7-inch 45 RPM records morphed into mp3s and played through a computer. Beethoven is surely rolling over.

So the daunting task of picking five songs from the 1970s has been tormenting me all week. How can you narrow that decade down to five songs? So many things happened, musically, that decade. Springsteen. Elton. All those mellow singer songwriters. Beatles solo careers. Prog. Disco. Punk. Post-Punk. New Wave. No Wave. And so on.

It’s tough to narrow the soundtrack of your formative years – for me, this is the period from first grade to the first time I got laid – down to five songs. It’s almost tougher to sift through the emotions that come with the songs. For aren’t the best songs the ones we connect to? The ones that lead us back to a certain time and place, the ones that lead us to a certain smell, a certain color, change of seasons, a certain girl. There’s a story and a feeling behind each one of the really special songs.

That’s the criteria I finally used to narrow down a warehouse full of songs. If the song didn’t have a story behind it, and a meaningful one, it was dropped. So here they are: the post-fab five, if you will, in no particular order.

1. “Lola,” The Kinks (1970). For me, it all started here. My fascination with music, that began at age 6 and stays with me to this day, began the first time I heard this song. I remember the spring morning in 1970 when I heard it. The strum opening. The picking. Then those magic words: “I met her in a club down in old Soho, where they drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry cola.”

I have heard this song so many times, I sometimes skip over it if it comes up in an ipod shuffle. But what the song means to me can’t be denied. There was no way it could miss the cut.

2. “Ball of Confusion,” The Temptations (1970): This was selected because every time I hear it, my mouth drops and I’m amazed. This may be the most powerful song of the rock era.

3. “I Think I Love You,” The Partridge Family (1970): OK, stop laughing. This is the first 45 RPM I ever owned. That alone makes it worthy of consideration. I remember my father coming home with it one night after work. Problem was, I didn’t have a record player at the time. That’s a whole other story.

4. “Photograph,” Ringo Starr (1973): When the Beatles broke up, I think most people were convinced that Ringo would have the hardest time making it on his own. Surprise! His first few albums were better than any of the other three, and he had a worthy string of hits including this beautiful song that wouldn’t have seemed too out of place on “The White Album.” In mid-1979, I developed my first serious crush on a girl, who became my first girlfriend. She, too, loved this song, and it became “our” song. During the chorus of this song, I still see her smile.

4. “Tears of a Clown,” Smoky Robinson and the Miracles (1971): A song so catchy and universal, it reminds me of all the 70s radio songs I listened to as a kid. And I listened to a lot of them.

5. “Thunder Road,” Bruce Springsteen (1975): I’ll never forget the sticky August Miami night in 1980 when this song hit me – it was a triple shot weekend on WSHE, and they played this, “Hungry Heart” and “Born to Run.” My buddy and I were 16 and driving ridiculously fast up I-95 after a Miami Planetarium laser light show in his sister’s Monte Carlo and this came on. I’ve been a Springsteen fanatic ever since.

So that’s it. I’m sorry “Fire and Rain,” “Fox on the Run,” and “It Don’t Matter to Me.” I just didn’t have a good story for you. But maybe if I think about it, I’ll come up with something that takes me back to the AM radio days I first heard you on. But then I think we’ll need 70s party part two.

 

It’s Hard to Root for a Blue Jay When You’re a Rays Fan, but…

It’s Hard to Root for a Blue Jay When You’re a Rays Fan, but…

No Fall to Speak Of

My poem, “No Fall to Speak Of,” was the featured poem on eggpoetry.com for the week of June 4, 2013. Here’s a link to check it out:

http://blog.eggpoetry.com/no-fall-to-speak-of_david_colodney/

It’s kind of funny how this one came about. I wrote it in a single burst on my iPhone – seriously, in the notes app – on a plane, waiting for a flight out of New Orleans back home to West Palm Beach.

Anyone who writes knows the revision, and revision, and constant revision that goes into it. On some of my poems, I’ll labor for hours over the right word (but not in the same sitting. I’m way too ADD for that). But this one, in its final version, is remarkably similar to what’s on my phone.

I used it as part of my master’s thesis at Nova. My thesis advisor suggested “fall” in the title be changed to “autumn.” It was a good debate, but I changed it. My thesis reader wanted to know why it was “autumn” and not “fall.” So I switched it back. That was the biggest edit in the poem. My thesis advisor and I shared a good laugh over the title switch.

How Bleached’s Search for the Lost Go-Go’s Album Resulted in My Favorite Record of the Year (so far)

Bleached

Ride Your Heart

Dead Oceans, 2013

Dave’s Grade (for what it’s worth): A

I can’t stop listening to this damn album.

Los Angeles’ Bleached appears to aspire to sound like every girl group (or every girl-fronted) group you’ve ever heard, from the Shirelles to the Bangles to the Breeders. And that’s a good thing because over the course of its 37 minutes, Ride Your Heart – Bleached’s first full-length record, released in April on the Dead Oceans imprint – shakes up all of its SoCal influences in a giant aural blender and what comes out is, essentially, the great lost Go-Go’s album. Again, a good thing, because I’m hard pressed to find a better (or more fun and entertaining) rock record out this year, one that is immediately accessible yet deceptively complex.  

Fronted by former Mika Miko members Jennifer and Jessica Clavin, Bleached takes us on a tour of all their influences, at first listen glossed up for a night out under a crystal-clear Southern California sky. “Looking For a Fight,” the opener, is what the Ramones would sound like if they were fronted by Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson of the B-52’s. The killer first single, “Next Stop,” follows. But as the record moves along, the Clavin sisters dig deeper. “Dead in Your Head,” with its soaring, multilayered psychedelic chorus, as well as the longing title track, wouldn’t seem out of place on the Beach Boys’ legendary Pet Sounds. “Waiting by the Telephone” recalls pre-Parallel Lines Blondie; Phil Spector could have produced “Dreaming Without You” for one of his girl groups in the 1960s. Ditto the closer, “When I Was Yours.”

Much like L.A. alt godmothers the Go-Go’s 1981 debut, Beauty and the Beat, hidden under the layer of cheer lie songs of loss and wondering. “Dead in Your Head,” clearly the centerpiece of the record, laments the inadvertent hurting of a boy the singer “loves the most,” but asks the chorus’ pointed question, “When you close your eyes at night, do you dream about all the things dead in your head?” In “Looking for a Fight,” singer Jennifer Clavin warns listeners right off the bat that she’s “not right.”  In “When I Was Yours,” she notes that she “has a bad brain that can’t be saved.” As the song (and album) fade into a burst of feedback, Jennifer mourns over the noise “I’ve almost tried to lift away.”

Brilliant in its pacing and nearly flawless in its production, Ride Your Heart is an astonishing debut. Able to blend its influences into something that never sounds derivative, Bleached – with any sort of luck – will be the soundtrack of many endless summers ahead. 

Spanish River Skies

“Spanish River Skies” was my first published poem, appearing as eggpoetry.com’s featured poem for the week of February 5, 2013. Regardless of what I think of the poem now – or 10 years from now – it will always mean something simply because it was the first one “out there” for public consumption.

In all honesty, “Spanish River Skies” made a difference for me on a lot of levels. By nature of the fact that an editor thought enough of it to publish it, the poem marked the point in my own thinking where I went from referring to myself as “a guy who writes these words hoping they mean something to someone” to “poet;” from referring to my output as “a bunch of word pictures on paper” to “poetry.” 

Here’s a link: http://blog.eggpoetry.com/spanish-river-skies_david_colodney/

Just Like Starting Over

After kicking around the idea of starting a blog up for months, I have finally done it. At least it wasn’t a snap decision.

And now the question is where to begin. I’ll try not to ponder that one for too long.

Let’s see.