in honor of my beloved friend karin, who is stuck inside of casper with the jersey blues again.

i attended a womens college in the mid 1980s. that should be sufficient enough an explanation for why i love kate bush and her glinda the good witch voice.

but for those of you who a) didn’t attend a womens college in the mid 1980s or b) don’t grasp the talent that is kate bush, think of this: she was signed at 16, thanks to the recommendation of pink floyd’s david gilmour. she wrote this song, as well as her single wuthering heights (later made more famous, and perhaps more sonically palatable, by pat benatar) sometime before she was 19.  sure, she sometimes sounds like a bag of cats being tortured. but she writes some of the most moving music and lyrics. i think her to be quite a pioneer, actually.

anyway, back to the man with the child in his eyes. bush wrote this one when she was 13 years old. when i was 13, i was writing songs, but nothing even remotely close to this.  it’s such a beautiful song with compelling lyrics. (my lyrics were far simpler, with romantic images of acid rain. no lie.) of course, it didn’t do much on the US charts in 1979; everyone here was still caught in the throes of crap like roller boogie, i’m sure.

but she persists. she has been lauded many times. and i don’t care if you laugh at me: i lurve her.

(and as for you karin, here’s a kate bush extra. love you.)

you and i must make a pack… a pack?

when i was young, i knew it wasn’t cool to like the osmonds (even though i watched their cartoon series every saturday morning.) however, i had no such fear of being uncool when it came to the jackson 5 (whose saturday morning cartoon i also watched. i often wondered whether the people at rankin/bass just altered the cartoon osmond’s faces and tweaked the storylines a little bit. no matter to me. i watched anyway.) in retrospect, i often wonder whether the older kids in both families felt screwed because their respective little brothers got all the attention. it’s 40 years later, and while i still know the names of the other brothers from both families, i couldn’t tell you who was who. i bet marie. la toya, and janet thank their lucky stars they were born girls.

but back to michael, michael, i LOVE you michael (a phrase i continue to hear in my dreams, decades after a particular concert.) somehow, the song i’ve always connected with, the song i’ve always cherished from their repertoire is i’ll be there. sure, there are moments when the pronunciations of certain words mystified me (as i alluded earlier, i could never figure out what michael meant when he sang  you and i could make a pack — we could bring salvation back. what the hell kind of pack did he mean, i wondered — a bag full of hope? a pack of lies? oh, if only the child could include a t at the end of that word.)

ah well. the song tugs at the heartstrings; and while i know there are many of my friends who think it incredibly uncool of me, i have loved this song for decades. this may change, now that an insurance company has taken it over and made it the center of their latest commercial campaign. i just don’t want to have to associate this song with state farm.

(once again, they’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot. gah.)

i guess michael needs cash now that he’s gone belly-up. and, true to form, this song is there to help.

i know what you’re thinking, and i’m thinking it too: a sour milk sea? gross.

george harrison wrote this lovely ode to spoiled dairy during the white album time period.  ah, that magical, prolific time when there were so many songs and only two albums to hold them. this, like a number of other lovely songs ended up on the cutting room floor (or ended up on other lps.) however, sour milk sea was recorded by harrison’s friend and apple recording artist jackie lomax.

and what a lineup you get when you’re an apple records artist in 1968: george harrison and eric clapton on guitars, paul mccartney on bass, ringo starr on drums, and nicky hopkins on keyboards (the latter played on an amazing array of works in the 1960s-80s and got screwed out of royalties on just about every single one of the works, thanks to his status as a session man.) not too shabby.

sadly for lomax, a great song and a great lineup does not guarantee fame and fortune, especially when you’re depending on the clunky money hemorrhage that was apple corps  in the late 1960s.  a fascinating (and now sadly out of print) account of the time by the “house hippie” recounts the mismanagement and utter insanity that took place in the house that john, paul, george and ringo built. in short, the single did okay but did not propel him to worldwide renown. (hell, apple floundered james taylor’s early career; if james taylor couldn’t get big while there in the early 1970s with songs like carolina in my mind and something in the way she moves, no one could.)

too bad, too. it’s a great song, and lomax provides a fine delivery, a loopy cross between george and marc bolan meets old musichall. the instrumentation is what sells it to me, especially hopkin’s wild piano.

but considering what happened to his career, i wouldn’t be surprised if lomax had a few moments of sour grapes.