Zombies

          Riding on the school bus to Merrillville Junior High School was no great pleasure for me back in the early 1960s.   If it had not been for the fact that Mr. Ifyu, the bus driver, had speakers in the bus and kept the radio dialed to top forty Chicago station WLS the ride could have been miserable.  As it were, I tolerated that ride and often just got lost in the music.

Image via Wikipedia          It was always a pleasure when a tune by the Zombies would air.  The hits "She's Not There" or "Tell Her No" were popular in 1964 as I was starting 8th grade.  Songs in a minor key seem to grab me.  Dream songs should be in a minor key.

           Later, when I was in high school and my family had moved to East Tennessee, the great Zombies album Odyssey and Oracle was released.  This is the one Zombies album that I actually owned.  I spent many hours with this album playing in the background of my life.  I lived and dreamed to this album.

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Neil Young

           It was probably about 1970.  My dear friend Fred and I were staying with our friend Forrest in an old mobile home his parents had in some neglected resort development that was rapidly falling into a state of decay.

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          The early morning sunlight was streaming through the windows of the room where I was sleeping.  But that's not what woke me up.  What woke me was very beautiful music.  The music was a string quartet at first and then a man singing.  I lay in bed for awhile listening to the music.  Golden particles of dust floated in the sun rays that gave me a warm feeling as I lay there listening to the melancholy music.

        On another day I was at the Hydraulic Lift, a head shop on the Cumberland Avenue strip near the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.  I was killing some time after classes.  They sold records at the Lift and I was browsing through the records.  Music was playing and a floral scent of incense filled the store.  I didn't recognize the music but it was some of the finest and most haunting music I had ever heard.  I breathed the scent of incense and became lost in the music.

         In both cases the music I was listening to was Neil Young.   In the first case it was the first album and then at the Lift it was the second album.   I was hooked.  When I was in the record store I bought a copy of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere as soon as I found out who it was.  Soon after I bought the first album.  After that I bought every album that Neil Young released.

         Now, forty years later, Neil Young is still one of my favorite artists and I listen to his music frequently.  He can rock hard, but my favorite songs are the dreamy sounding ones.  Neil can write some great songs to dream by.

         Today's song choice--"After the Goldrush"--is about a dream.

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X

        Although I was aware of this band in the 1980s, I was not a fan.  Never owned an album and didn't listen to most music in this style.   But I often read about John Doe and Exene Cervenka, the two key members of this punk rock group, in Rolling Stone and other music magazines.

        When I was traveling with a road show during that decade, I can recall often tuning in to some Saturday night punk/new wave music show.  I didn't know what I was watching but it was mostly weird performance-wise and grating music-wise. But I watched it anyway because it was--well, shall I say--somewhat riveting.  Kind of like a bad accident.

          Late Saturday nights, usually after having driven for a few hours, in a strange motel in a strange town, watching this weird music show.   I vaguely remember.  It was kind of like live wrestling except it was punk rock music.   X was probably one of the groups that often appeared on this show.  Couldn't tell you now.  Don't care too much.

          A band called X just seemed like an appropriate band to talk about for the letter "X".



   

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Porter Wagoner

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           When I was in high school back in the 1960s, I didn't have much of a social life.   I can recall on Saturday afternoons how I'd turn on the TV and watch country music shows like Bonnie Lou and Buster, the Stoneman Family, and Porter Wagoner.   During that period, Porter Wagoner featured on his show a young singer with big blonde hair.  This singer was Dolly Parton and for many years she was a regular on Wagoner's show and on his tours.

           Back then I swore I didn't like country music, yet something about these shows fascinated me.  The music and the artists started to become dear to me as I began to appreciate their music.  As country-rock became popular so did some of these roots artists become popular with the rock crowd.  That's when I became a country music fan.  After all, a lot of country music is really just rock and roll with fiddles and steel guitars and sung with twangy country drawls.

               Porter Wagoner's 1965 hit "Green, Green Grass of Home" is one of the best dream songs ever.  Many readers will most likely be more familiar with the version sung by Tom Jones, but Porter sang it first.

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The Ventures

         Back in 1964 or so I'd spend hours on my bedroom floor, building models of cars, planes, and monsters from kits I'd bought at the dime store.  I had a portable record player that I kept turning with albums by groups like Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, The Beach Boys, and The Beatles.  One album that received as much play as any of them was The Ventures in Space.

        The song "Sleepwalk" was not on that album, but it's a standard that I had heard by many other groups. The Ventures are a group that might be heard in my dreams.   The song "Sleepwalk" would be an appropriate choice for a dream soundtrack.

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