“Music was my refuge”

“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”                                                                                                                   Maya Angelou 

by Bob Sparrow

My friends, Martin & Taylor

Yes, I’ve been consumed mostly with music during this ‘house arrest’ we’re all experiencing.  I’ve been reading about it, as explained in my last blog, listening to it, trying to write it as well as play it on my 6 and 12 string guitars (named Martin & Taylor) – who have become my two closest friends these past few weeks!

Just prior to the pandemic I had a CD player installed in my car, much to my wife’s dismay.  “You have Amazon music on your phone, so you have access to virtually every song in the universe.  Why do you need a CD player in your car?”, she asked.  Well, it’s because, over the years, I’ve made somewhere around 100 ‘personal’ CDs – play lists of songs that can’t be found on Amazon, or anywhere else for that matter.  As well as a CD of songs that my best friend, Don and I sang in Atsugi, Japan in 1968 and a CD of us singing at our 50-year class reunion.

Her response: “What’s next, are you going to put an 8-track player in there as well?”

With Don, Naval officers in Japan – 1968          With Don at 50-year class reunion – 2011

While I thought that was pretty funny; I did think about that for a moment, but I’d have to go deep into the archives to find any 8-track tapes.  It would have been more logical to put in a cassette tape player, as I have a good number of cassettes.  I do have a cassette player in my office and I had the cassettes that Don and I exchanged while he was in Saudi Arabia, prior to the Internet, transferred to CDs – so I can now play those in my car.  Then there’s my vinyl collection, but I don’t think they make turntables for my car, so I’m content listening to them in my office (think, man cave).

As for playing my guitar, aside from practicing ‘Monday Knights’ band songs, our neighborhood has been doing some ‘Friday afternoon, driveway cocktail parties’ where we gather in a driveway, keeping our social distance, and having a cocktail.  A couple of Fridays ago, we hosted it and, knowing that everyone was really hard up for entertainment, I played and sang some songs from an anthology I put together called The History of Rock & RollChapter 1 is ‘The 50s’, where I gave some background of the songs and the writers, and played ‘Rock Around the Clock’, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, ‘Johnny B. Goode’, then threw in a couple of songs from the ‘Folk Scare’ taking place during the late 50s and sang ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’ and ‘Scotch & Soda’.   At the conclusion someone mentioned something about not quitting my day job! Nonplussed, I’ve put Chapter 2 together, ‘The 60s’, but it’s not ready for prime time yet – heck, it’s not even ready for late night!

Vinyl collection

I’m also trying to write some songs and so have reconnected with former neighbor and song-writing partner, Doug Bynon.  I’ve got a whole bunch of lyrics rolling around in my head and he’s been pretty good at putting them to music.  We’ve done this before, creating song original songs – you’re not going to hear them on the radio, but it seems to scratch a creative itch in both of us.

While you may not want to sing, play or write songs, we can all listen to some great music.  I like what this next quote has to say about the music you listen to:

“Tell me what you listen to, and I’ll tell you who you are.” ― Tiffanie DeBartolo

If the DeBartolo name is sounding familiar to some of you 49er fans, yes, she is the daughter of the former owner of the 49ers, Ed DeBartolo.

So, if you’re running out of things to do . . . find some music you like and find out who you are!

I’M IN LOVE WITH PERRY MASON

By Suzanne Sparrow Watson

Raymond Burr, as Perry Mason

Well, here we are…still.  I hope you are all doing well and haven’t killed your spouse yet.  Okay, that might be a bit drastic but I’ve been influenced by crime TV during my “staycation”.  Specifically, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Perry Mason, the TV show from the 50’s and 60’s.  Some things have not changed much in the intervening years – just as with ther current show, Dateline, the spouse is almost always the perpetrator.  Hopefully, you are still experiencing wedded bliss and Keith Morrison won’t be knocking on your front door anytime soon.  But…back to Perry.  I stumbled across the series as I was surfing our 450 channels for something to watch.  As it happens, Family Entertainment TV (don’t worry – I’d never heard of it either) was starting the series from the beginning.  What the heck?  I figured out that to watch the entire series from beginning to end without any breaks takes up 10 days. Heck, I don’t have anything else to do.  Plus, I relished the idea of taking a trip down memory lane recalling those wonderful Saturday nights when I watched the show, intrigued not with Raymond Burr, who played Perry, but with his “confidential secretary”, Della Street.

William Talman, sad sack Hamilton Burger

It has been interesting watching the series as an adult. Obviously, beyond the tail fins on cars and the lack of cell phones, the biggest change has been the role of women. There was a woman judge in a few episodes but no female attorneys. Mostly, women played murderers or victims. But still, it turns out that the show influenced a good share of women.  Sonja Sotomayor, the Supreme Court justice, was one.  In her autobiography she says she was hooked on the law when during one episode Perry asked the prosecutor, Hamilton Burger, if he wasn’t troubled that he had spent so much time prosecuting Perry’s client only to find he was innocent. “My job as a prosecutor is to do justice,” Sotomayor quotes the prosecutor as saying. “And justice is served when a guilty man is convicted and an innocent man is not.”

That prosecutor was Hamilton Burger, who lost all but three cases to Perry.  Makes you wonder how the guy kept his job.  Turns out that William Talman, who played Burger, didn’t keep his job.  He was fired by CBS March 18, 1960, hours after he entered a not-guilty plea to misdemeanor charges related to his presence at a party that was raided by police for marijuana use. Back then they did not consider marijuana an “essential” business.  The shooting schedule was immediately juggled to minimize Talman’s presence on the show.  CBS would not relent, even after the charges were dropped.  In December 1960, after millions of fans protested, he returned to the show where he would remain until the end of the series.  Now that I’ve watched three seasons of the show I think I’ve figured out why he was so inept – every week he used the same line when objecting to Perry’s questioning of his witness: “Your honor, this entire line of questioning is incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial”.  Really, every frigging week he says the same thing.   Wouldn’t you think he – or the writer’s – could come up with something else?  No wonder he lost all those cases.

Della Street and Paul Drake

Paul Drake, Perry’s private detective, was the most fun character on the show.  He did all the dirty work – sneaking into office buildings, tailing a suspect or flying somewhere to gather background “dirt”.  Each week he seemed to get in and out of some perilous situations, often involving a beautiful woman.  Drake was played by William Hopper, whose mother was Hedda Hopper, the famous gossip columnist.  He was a big hunk of a guy and I always suspected that Della was torn between her crush on Perry and him.  Or maybe that was just my youthful imagination.  But back to Della.  She was played by Barbara Hale and I idolized her when I was growing up.  She had wonderful clothes, was smart as a whip, and she always got to stay in the room with Perry when a client spilled their guts.   I thought she had the perfect job.  Of course, now I realize that she was probably grossly underpaid, especially given that she seemed to be at Perry’s beck and call at all hours of the night.  Which makes me wonder how she afforded all those fabulous clothes. Nevertheless, Della was not just a secretary, although she fetched her share of coffee, but someone who Perry listened to and who often gave him the logic or clue needed to solve the case.

I just read that HBO is coming out with a new Perry Mason film in June, starring Matthew Rhys as Perry.  It will focus on the early days of his career, before he became a high-priced defense attorney.  I’ll keep an open mind, but I don’t know how it can possibly be better than the TV show.  No Hamilton Burger, no one in the gallery shouting “I did it!  I killed him.” at the last minute, and most importantly, no Della Street.  Somehow, that just seems wrong.

 

 

 

Music is the Moonlight . . .

by Bob Sparrow

“Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life.” Jean Paul Richter

Not that life is gloomy right now or anything, it’s just that it’s . . . different.  We find ourselves looking for things to do around the cell, er, house; things that will help us keep our sanity while in solitary or familial confinement.  We’ve completed most of those DIY ‘projects’, at least the ones that we were actually capable of completing, not the ones like fixing that leaky hot water heater valve or rewiring that electrical box.

So, let me suggest something that has helped me ‘pass the time’ – music.  Like me, you have probably found some solace in listening to  music, singing in the shower or watching (and re-watching) concerts on TV; and I say keep doing those things, but I’m proffering some additional literary therapy and documentary escapism.  Over the past few months, and particularly now that reading is one of my more athletic activities during the course of a day, I have found three excellent books and one Netflix documentary that I would recommend to any pop music lover.

The Wrecking Crew by by Kent Hartman

Flyleaf notes: “A sweet and wistful meditation on the early days of the music business, full of little gems and wonders fit for serious music fans and a commendable, long-overdue tribute to the legendary Wrecking Crew – the ridiculously talented, go-to guys behind so many hits. This book will make your head spin.”  You think you know who played the music on most of the hit songs you listened to?  You don’t!”

The Song Machine by John Seabrook

Flyleaf notes: “There’s a reason today’s ubiquitous pop hits are so hard to ignore―they’re designed that way. The Song Machine goes behind the scenes to offer an insider’s look at the global hit factories manufacturing the songs that have everyone hooked.”

Goodnight, LA   also by Kent Hartman

“The rise and fall of classic rock – the untold stories from inside the LA recording studios.  The music scene in Los Angeles was dominated by rock ‘n’ roll. If a group wanted to hit it big, L.A. was the place to be.”  Let the in-fighting begin.

Echo in the Canyon Netflix

Echo In The Canyon celebrates the popular music that came out of L.A.’s Laurel Canyon neighborhood in the mid-60s as folk went electric and The Byrds, The Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield, and The Mamas and the Papas cemented the ‘California sound’.

If you enjoy popular music, and by that I mean songs that were popular from the 60s to present day, you should enjoy the myriad of stories about the lives of people who made it all possible.

 

                                                                                           

“If music be the food of love, play on.”  William Shakespeare

Stay well!!!

GROUNDHOG DAY

By Suzanne Sparrow Watson

Happy Monday!  It is Monday, isn’t it?  I get so confused these days.  Usually I awaken each morning and before emerging from my bed I think about what day of the week it is and what I have scheduled on the calendar.  It’s sort of a memory test, plus the results dictate whether I’m happy about my day and bounce out of bed or whether I’m having a root canal and decide to languish for a bit longer.  These days, I am really struggling.  With everything on my calendar pretty much wiped out, one day just runs into the next.  It takes me several minutes to figure out the day and – sadly – many days I am wrong.  But I can hardly be blamed.  Just like Bill Murray, every day is Groundhog Day.

As an “at risk” person due to my age, I need to stay home unless I require food, medicine or money.  Frankly, I’d love to know where I could get some money.  I made the mistake this morning of looking at our brokerage account.  I know that the market has been bad but after looking at our balance I almost wish that our broker had absconded to Mexico and was spending our retirement money on pina coladas.  At least then someone would be having fun with it.  But…back to my “staycation” routine.  My first decision of the day is what to wear.  This used to be a fun activity, sorting through my clothes and putting things together. Now I’m down to deciding which color of sweat pants to wear.  I try to save the black ones for formal occasions – like when the Amazon delivery person is coming. After breakfast we take Dash the Wonder Dog on a walk and then I begin my anti-Covid 19 immunity response.  Right now I’m taking Vitamins C and D, a tablespoon of Sambucol Elderberry Syrup and a packet of Emergen-C.  I have NO idea whether any of that is doing any good but I figure it can’t hurt.  And, I haven’t gotten sick so, fingers crossed, hopefully it’s working, even if it’s all in my head.  Once fortified, I begin on my activities for the day.  I am maintaining my 10,000 steps/day routine.  It’s fairly easy this time of year when our weather is beautiful.  If the virus hangs on until summer and our fitness center remains closed I think I’ll be wearing holes in our rugs marching around the house.  Or, by then, the insane asylum.  But that’s a worry for another day.

All that takes me to about 9 o’clock.  That’s a whole lot of time to kill for the rest of the day trapped inside the house.  I saw a segment on the new-found popularity of jigsaw puzzles on CBS Sunday Morning last week and that reminded me that I had some puzzles stashed away.  I broke one out and started to put the edge pieces together only to discover that my eyesight isn’t what it used to be.  Several of the pieces that I put together did not actually fit correctly but I couldn’t see that so I had something of a jumble on my hands.  It’s still sitting on our dinette table and as this staycation drags on I’m sure I’ll get bored enough to take up the task once again.  Hopefully with better lighting.  My knitting friends and I have discovered (along with the rest of America) the magic of Zoom, the internet meeting app.  So on our regular knitting time on Wednesdays we meet up.  It accomplishes two things – first, it proves that women of a certain age can still master some new technology and second, it puts something fun on the calendar.

Alas, I have to admit that once I’ve cleaned the house for the umpteenth time, watched a few episodes of Grace and Frankie,  and then knit for a couple of hours, I resort to playing Candy Crush on my iPad.  It truly is amazing what a time suck it is.  On the other hand, it keeps me from looking at the latest coronavirus stats and worrying about the health and safety of those I love.  It’s only April 6th.  I know that we all can get through this.  I just hope that it ends before I’ve mastered all 6365 levels of Candy Crush.