Charlie Brown is All Shook Up

I found this fun thing on Youtube. I like Elvis Presley's "All Shook Up". I drove our supervisor nuts when I worked at Brandom's Cabinet Mfg. back home in Keene. I think I've already told this story, but it bears repeating. I only worked at Brandom's a few months during a brief time of desperation and unemployment. Our lady foreman for the framing department wouldn't allow us to listen to the radio while we were working so the guy next to me and I taped the words to Elvis songs on our work boards and merrily framed cabinets while singing Heartbreak Hotel and All Shook Up. She tried to force us to stop, but management wouldn't allow her to stifle our creativity. They noticed we worked faster when we were singing.

This is the slower original version which I think was way better than the one he sang during his later years where he rushed it and always seemed to be in a hurry to get through it. I liked it better when he sang it like he wasn't tired of the song. Maybe he figured he was running out of time. Turns out he was.

The Peanuts Gang version is just fun.

Tom

Centerfield

 

 The sun is out and there's new grass on the field. There are some familiar songs about baseball out there and some not so familiar. They range from "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" to Peter Paul & Mary's poignant "Right Field". Right Field is sort of my baseball theme song. But this song by CCR's John Fogarty is the one that gets me charged up to see a game.

Now if only Major League Baseball doesn't shoot its fans in the foot like the NFL did with a load of woke, LGBQT double plus ungood nonsense, I might even go to a game.

Boy how I miss Nolan Ryan and Pudge Rodriguez!

Tom King 2013

 

Charlie Brown is All Shook Up

I found this fun thing on Youtube. I like Elvis Presley's "All Shook Up". I drove our supervisor nuts when I worked at Brandom's Cabinet Mfg. back home in Keene. I think I've already told this story, but it bears repeating. I only worked at Brandom's a few months during a brief time of desperation and unemployment. Our lady foreman for the framing department wouldn't allow us to listen to the radio while we were working so the guy next to me and I taped the words to Elvis songs on our work boards and merrily framed cabinets while singing Heartbreak Hotel and All Shook Up. She tried to force us to stop, but management wouldn't allow he to stifle our creativity. They noticed we worked faster when we were singing.

This is the slower original version which I think was way better than the one he sang during his later years where he rushed it and always seemed to be in a hurry to get through it. I liked it better when he sang it like he wasn't tired of the song. Maybe he figured he was running out of time. Turns out he was.

The Peanuts Gang version is just fun.

Tom

Space Oddity - Ground Control to Major Me

The first time I heard this David Bowie song, I felt like he was singing it to me. This was my song. I wanted to be an astronaut, but unfortunately being an astronaut is HAAAAAAARD!  That and God had other stuff for me to do so I've put off going into space for when we get carried off to heaven. If there's an orbital lab around the new Earth I plan to be on the construction crew - either that I want to be on the crew of a star ship.  I'm certain there will be stuff like that. After all, we are an exploring species and those of us who survive the old Earth should be trustworthy enough to turn loose to explore the stars and there are an awful lot of those out there, so we likely won't be bored with it all since we're living forever.

This is the coolest version of the song ever done. It's Canadian ISS astronaut Chris Hadfield singing with NASA footage in a monumentally marvelous music video. Hadfield has a really good voice too. So enjoy the first space-based music video with actual astronauts and footage shot in space. I still think they're singing my song, though.

"Major" Tom King

YMCA - Minions Style

My wife says I'm just a big kid. Listening to my Mp3 list is probably evidence of that. It tends to lean heavily toward Disney songs and old folk music suitable for kids. I'm a big romantic. I've got a dozen or so Doris Day songs, some things from Aladdin, Tangled, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Camelot and clips from Danny Kaye movies. This one I have no excuse for. I'm a six year old!

I just love these guys. I'll most likely post a whole bunch of these before it's over. Then there's this song from the wedding scene - "I Swear!"  It just brings tears to my eyes (I'm laughing so hard).

Tom

Steve n' Seagulls - Thunderstruck

 

These guys are from Finland. Bluegrass Rock in Finland. Who knew? This will wake you up of a morning.

Home Free - American Pie w/ Don McLean

 

Radio disk jockeys used to love this song. They could put it on and wander off for 15 minutes to get a snack or go to the bathroom and not have to worry so much about the time. The enigmatic Don McLean classic is here done by the awesome acapella group Home Free with Don McLean joining in with lead vocals.

Kick back and enjoy this oldie-goldie blast from the past and see if you remember what all the lyrics were talking about.

Tom

 

 

 

Stand Up and Cheer

Madison Rising came out with this powerful rendition of the Star Spangled Banner a few years ago. Fans at ball games and track meets go nuts over this version of the anthem. I believe this and others I shall post later should be played loudly over players who kneel to some bogus Marxist narrative that denies the sacrifice made by our great great great grandfathers made to rid our nation of the vile curse of Democrat defended slavery. My own ancestor, my great great great great grandfather Samuel Harris, who marched with Sherman and died in the appalling misery of a Confederate prison camp. The party of Jefferson Davis, George Wallace, LBJ and Robert Byrd have a lot to answer for. When I hear the anthem I get a thrill of pride for all the brave men and women who won freedom for all of us. It took a while, but we've got it done, despite those who would take us back and rebuild all the old animosities and hatreds. Instead we Christians must band together and obey His command, and more so as the day approaches.

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.

John 13:34

I'm All Shook Up, How About You?

I got hooked on this song when I worked for a while at a place I had all my life hoped never to have to work at - Brandom's Manufacturing, a maker of kitchen cabinets in Keene, Texas. I had worked my way through school at every other job that was to be had in Keene, including as a janitor at the nursing home and that one was a pretty grim job let me tell you.

But I found myself back home and between jobs, with a wife and kids and old enough to be sassy and not terribly subservient. I already had my Bachelor's degree, but I'd abandoned the Great Advent Movement that is school teaching in SDA church schools. I didn't leave the church, just teaching. After that, I'd done a brief and brutal run at nuclear power plant construction and had been laid off. Then, I found a good job as a recreation therapist....sort of. We were doing a startup treatment center for emotionally disturbed kids and the job was still a few months away. I was also between cars at the time, so I needed something I could walk to.

So I took a job at minimum wage in the framing department at Brandoms. I was putting together oak frames for cabinet boxes. It was boring to say the least and I couldn't get any speed up (we had a quota). My foreman was the mother of a kid who used to beat me up in elementary school and she had very little in the way of a sense of humor. We were banned from having radios and/or those new Walkman things. So the guy next to me and I decided we'd make our own music.

I dug around for some suitable lyrics that were singable. As it turned out "The King of Rock n' Roll" proved to be just the ticket. The right speed, easy to sing and easy to learn the lyrics. We learned a bunch of his songs my friend and I. I taped the lyrics to my framing table and sang as I worked, my buddy joining in from next door. Our favorite was "All Shook Up!"

Well it wasn't long before the foreman came stalking in to demand that we stop. We protested that there was no company rule against singing - just against radios. She sputtered a bit, then went off to talk to her supervisor. He told her there was no rule against singing so long as we didn't sing dirty words. She returned frustrated. You could see it in her eyes. So she tried another tactic.

This time she went around to everybody who could remotely have heard us singing over the screech of saws and drills and asked if our singing was "bothering" anyone. Everybody said it didn't. Many said, they liked it. Some sang along. Man she hated me, especially after she checked out our framing output to see if the singing of Elvis tunes was slowing down our production. Au contraire'. Our output had improved more than a little.

So here's one of our favorite "songs to frame cabinets by." I even worked in a little Elvis style leg jerk on the "Ooooh, I'm all shook up!" line. 

Like Elvis, we was very very awesomely cool! We also sang "Burnin' Love".  When we got to the "I'm a hunka hunka hunka burnin' love" part, Mrs. B. used to have to go down to the water fountain, it offended her sensibilities so.

Tom

I AM an Ape Man

This is such an odd little song. First time I heard it, I hearkened back to my youth when I used to climb the trees every morning and wake the neighbors doing my Tarzan yell! I was a weird little kid back then. This is also the opening theme to Robin Williams' singular film, "Club Paradise" which I really liked, the critics notwithstanding.

I've always been fascinated by Tarzan. He's a hero figure and kind of a lonely guy living there among the apes. It's hard not to become one of the apes if you ever grow up to have any power over others, especially when the apes used to push you around when you were little. The great temptation is, as another song I posted earlier put it, to be "sittin' around in some junglescape, dumb as an ape doin' nothing."  I admit it. The whole jungle thing appeals to me.

So here are The Kinks with a live version of their classic, "Ape Man".

Center Field

Willy Mays' over-the-shoulder catch - the man could play center field.

Truth be known I always played right field and I have a song for that one too, but this one is probably my favorite baseball song of all time. The inimitable John Fogerty's classic "Center Field" has some wonderful baseball lines like this one....

A roundin' third and headin' for home,
It's a brown-eyed handsome man.
Even someone with relatively sad baseball playing skills like me can dream. I did improve somewhat with age, but then my knees started going and I gained weight, so I never really achieved baseball glory, but I do like the sport. It's very American in that it's a series of personal contests between pitcher and batter with a break between. American football is like that too. There's a reason we never warmed to "football" the way everyone else in the world did. We need to see the little individual victories - the pass caught, the home run hit, the slam dunk. In soccer, you get a bunch of guys running around kicking a ball for two hours and the final score might wind up being 2 to 0. That's just downright unAmerican. 

Here's Fogerty singing about the great American sport and a nice video of vintage film from America's great baseball history.
 
Didn't that make you want to just dig up your old baseball glove and go throw a few with some kid you've got laying around the house playing video games?

Tom

Lookin' Out My Backdoor

I've always been fond of porches. This Creedence Clearwater Revival song is kind of my "sittin' on the back porch" theme song.  Meanwhile, I "...got to sit down, take a rest on the porch." Now what happens next is somewhat ambiguous. It could be a straightforward reverie or something more chemically induced, but I prefer to think of the tambourines and elephants bit as a daydream. So here's CCR front man, John Fogarty, live with some back porch music for a Monday morning....

Now wasn't that fun?

Tom 

The Man of the Hour is Taking His Final Bow

Someone once belittled this song as being from Pearl Jam's "Daddy Issues" period. Me thinks the critic doth protest too much. We all have to come to terms with who our Fathers are. Mine ran off on my Mom and us when I was five, was an alcoholic, then a convict, then finally a recovering alcoholic. He was shot and killed in 1987 by my stepmother - ironically the one he left my Mom for. It tore our family apart. 

For all his flaws and failings, I loved my Dad, though. But for most of my life, I stayed at arm's length. Dad tried to close the gap one summer when I worked for him setting foundations and laying brick. Dad even tried to apologize to me for his colorful past in front of an AA meeting. The gesture meant a lot to me. A former rodeo cowboy and fisherman, Dad was something of a character. People liked him. And like a lot of colorful characters, Dad died too young.

I'm not a big Pearl Jam fan, but this song speaks to me. I heard it first during the credits to the film Big Fish which was a film about a son with father issues and how he resolved them by accepting his Dad as he was. I think I may have closed the gap with my own sons, though maybe not as well as I would have liked. It was just in time with the middle boy. He died at age 28 and I failed to revive him. Fathers should not outlive their sons. I hope we got everything said between us. For some reasons our last few weeks together were a series of heart-to-heart talks. I miss him. The eldest is also far away so that we have to communicate in writing.

Daughters are another matter for fathers. My own daughter is more comfortable around me to say the least. She is all prepared to take over bossing me around if my wife ever falls down on the job. She calls a couple of times a year to give me a lecture. I was actually hoping my grandkids would like me, but I fear my branch of the King genetic line is fixing to become extinct. And I was already ready for them too.

Here's Pearl Jam with "Man of the Hour".

Happy belated Father's Day to anyone I missed.  Hug your kids. They need you whether they know it or not.

Tom

Talkin' 'bout My Generation

The Zimmers recreate the Beatles iconic Abby Road photo.

This week I got deep into a federal grant and didn't post any new songs. This is my secular song for the week. It's by a lovely group of senior citizens. The thing was first done about ten years ago. The group is called The Zimmers. Their lead singer here is 90 years old. He's since passed on and more boomers have filled in the lower ranks. They had a run on both Britain's Got Talent and America's Got Talent and people really love them.  It's appropriate that their first number is The Who's "Talkin' 'bout My Generation".

These guys are really fun and the song is on my mp3 player don't ya' know!

And THAT my friend was the world's oldest Rock Band. They are collectively 3000 years old between them. I find that inspiring and encouraging.

Just sayin',

Tom King

I AM an Ape Man

This is such an odd little song. First time I heard it, I hearkened back to my youth when I used to climb the trees every morning and wake the neighbors doing my Tarzan yell! I was a weird little kid back then. This is also the opening theme to Robin Williams' singular film, "Club Paradise" which I really liked, the critics notwithstanding.

I've always been fascinated by Tarzan. He's a hero figure and kind of a lonely guy living there among the apes. It's hard not to become one of the apes if you ever grow up to have any power over others, especially when the apes used to push you around when you were little. The great temptation is, as another song I posted earlier put it, to be "sittin' around in some junglescape, dumb as an ape doin' nothing."  I admit it. The whole jungle thing appeals to me.

So here are The Kinks with a live version of their classic, "Ape Man".