365 Day Song Challenge: Day 16 – “Run To Paradise”

Posted on by Joe Parker

Day 16. A song you have seen performed live:

“Run To Paradise” — Choirboys

As I mentioned yesterday, I was fortunate enough to go on a student exchange to Australia in 1988. I was even more fortunate to return in 1992 to work on a college project with two of my classmates. However, it’s not all wine and roses. For those who have never traveled to Australia from the East Coast of the United States, let me give you a brief description of the travel.

  • The night before you travel you get next to no sleep because you’re pretty excited about the trip. Yay! Australia! This is such a great idea!
  • You get up at an ungodly hour (something like 5AM Eastern Time) to get to the airport. Man, I’m tired, but Yay! Australia!
  • The flight to LA (or San Francisco, but in my case, LA) is about 6 hours. You arrive there at about 1PM Eastern/10AM Pacific Time. Good God, this is just the beginning. But at least we’re going to Australia.
  • Flights on Qantas over to Australia don’t leave until about 2AM ET/11PM PT, so that you arrive in Sydney in the morning. Therefore, you sit in the airport for 10-12 hours doing nothing, waiting until you can check through to customs 2 hours before the flight leaves. (Keeping in mind that as a high school/college student going abroad you don’t have the extra cash to leave the airport and take a cab to see anything.) Oh God, I’m so bored. When can we finally get on the plane?
  • The flight itself is about 14 hours and change. When can we get off this plane? Are we $&*!ing there yet? Who’s idea was this anyway? $&*! Australia.

You arrive about 7AM Sydney time (3PM ET, 12 Noon PT). All in all, about 36 hours, not including the lack of sleep from the night before you left.

Now, it should be noted: I can’t sleep on planes, really. I might doze for 30 minutes, but then my cursed neck starts to hurt and I wake up in pain. You learn how long 14 hours really is when you’re cooped up in a coach seat that whole time, everyone around you is sleeping, and you’re trying to figure out how to pass the time. You start to ponder how something that big can stay aloft that long.

And yes, I’ve tried those airplane pillows.

And no, they don’t help me.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you: “Waaaah! You’re going to Australia ya whiner.” Point taken.

We finally land, get picked up, and, to make this part of a long story short, spend the next few hours getting settled.

“So what about the song?” you ask. Calm down; I’m getting there.

Round about 2PM (or in more applicable terms, 41 hours after I woke up), someone says “The Choirboys are playing at Shelly’s tonight. You want to go?” (Shelly’s is the night club at the Shellharbour Worker’s Club.)

“Are you crazy? That would be dumb. We’re tired. We’re not going.”

We were dumb. We went.

My recollection is that the show started at 9. And that there was an opening act (a band called The Tornados, if I remember correctly). And that it was at least 10PM (or in more applicable terms, 49 hours after I woke up) that The Choirboys hit the stage. For the uninitiated (read: almost everyone): they are an Australian hard rock band. Not quite AC/DC; in that vein but leaning slightly more in a pop direction.

Long story longer… As you might expect, I don’t remember a lot about that show, but I do know I enjoyed it and that they played this song. It had been their “big hit” a couple of years prior.

I don’t remember what time we got home or how many hours I’d been awake by that time. (The number 52 sticks in my head for some reason, but that may be the result of sleep-deprived insanity.)

As a side note, this song was also a favorite of my host sister Megan at the time. (This is not the same host sister that we bongoed the crap out of in yesterday’s post. Boy, that sounds dirty.) So even after the show, I heard it quite frequently over the next 4 1/2 months.

Outside of the sleep deprivation, the show was a fun way to start the trip. Until the flight home. Let me tell you about the flight home…

365 Day Song Challenge: Day 15 – “You Can Call Me Al”

Posted on by Joe Parker

Day 15. A song your parents played on road trips when you were young

“You Can Call Me Al” — Paul Simon

paulsimonchevy“Young” is a relative term. I’m 43 years old, and I still feel young. I’m assuming that the creator of the challenge meant “when you were a kid” but it’s vague enough to allow for some license.

I’m going to use that license, because, although we did a lot of road trips when I was a kid, I never remember us listening to music. My parents were not “The Wheels On The Bus”-type people (thank God). On top of that, we did a lot of overnight driving. The “if we leave at midnight the kids will sleep and we won’t have to listen to them” mentality. Of which I wholeheartedly approve as an adult.

When I was really young—the time when we did the most driving—we were still in the era of AM radio in the car. (Cue “AM Radio” by Everclear.) By the time we got to the era of the Power Wagon, and the capability to play tapes, most of those really long trips were a thing of the past (and a good thing, too, given the Power Wagon’s other “amenities”). So, as a kid, I got nothin’.

This is where the license comes in.

In 1988 I went on a student exchange to Australia, where, as it happens, we also did a lot of road trips. I saw a bunch of New South Wales from the back seat of a Holden Premier station wagon (which actually did have power and did have a tape deck). So I’m focusing on those.

In preparation for the exchange, I had taped a lot of albums, one of those being Paul Simon’s Graceland(with his first greatest hits album, Greatest Hits, Etc., now long out of print, on the B side). For one reason or another, we started listening to that tape every time we went somewhere.

I stayed in Kiama, NSW, which was some sort of weird focal point for exchange students. While I was there, we had at least six or seven students from other countries just in my class. I’m not sure why that was. One of those, a guy from Denmark named Janus became a close friend, and he began to spend a lot of time with my family, joining us on many of those trips.

Now, we were pretty goofy as it was, but when “You Can Call Me Al” would come on, the goofiness went to 11. During the song, we played air guitar, air bass, air trumpet (mimicking the moves from the video as much as you can while sitting in a back seat), air pennywhistle, air bongos… Anything “air.” Which must have looked really weird to anyone who saw us.

Cascading notes, starting on that last paragraph:

  • I do remember one trip when we didn’t do “air bongos”: my host sister was stretched across three of us in the back seat, and her legs became our bongos. We bongoed the crap out of those legs. The song was on, she was there; as far as I’m concerned, she asked for it.
    • Yes, she was stretched out across our laps. We were packed in there. This was the 80’s, seatbelt use wasn’t what it is today, and we were in the middle of nowhere on a two-lane highway in NSW. Oh, and my host father was a NSW State Policeman.
      • The fact that he was a NSW State Policeman didn’t mean we wouldn’t die if there was an accident, but it did mean we weren’t likely to get in trouble should we get pulled over.
        • We lived to tell the tale.
        • We did not get pulled over.
        • Four levels of bullets is too many. Any decent editor or web designer will tell you that.

And now, here’s something we hope you’ll really like:

365 Day Song Challenge: Day 14 – “Dance With The Devil”

Posted on by Joe Parker

Day 14. A song you like that’s instrumental only

“Dance With The Devil” — UB40*

DanceWithTheDevilLet me start by saying that, on the whole, I like instrumentals. While some people may think that a song with no words is a cop-out, as if the songwriter is only doing half the work, I think that to write a song that holds your interest without vocals is a challenge. Well-done instrumentals are worthy of your attention.

Now that I’ve bored you with that (always a smart move when trying to keep people reading), I’ll move on to the rest of the post.

My introduction to UB40 was in 1985 when they released the cover of “I Got You Babe”they did with Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders. I didn’t pay much attention. Not really my thing.

In 1988 my friend Mark was my ride to school. Then he got a girlfriend and I got relegated to the back seat. Perfectly understandable, but I was nonetheless unimpressed to be stuck back there. I really don’t like riding in the back seat, even today.

To her credit, however, she introduced him to some new music, including Bob Marley. That was my first real introduction to reggae, and I kind of liked it.

One morning we were listening to something that, in my ignorance, I thought was Bob Marley. Turned out it was UB40. “Red Red Wine”was climbing the charts, no doubt to the simultaneous joy and dismay of UB40, since “Red, Red Wine” was five years old at that point and they’d recently released a new album that wasn’t getting much attention at all.

Because of that, I started paying attention to UB40. That year they toured, with one of the stops being Springfield at the then recently reopened Paramount Theater. We went to the concert, even though my only exposure was still only Labour Of Love.

After Ipso Facto (the opening act) finished, we waited. After what seemed like a very long time, some music started. The riff repeated for, again, what seemed like a long time before the band actually took the stage and the horns started. I like horns. So despite the wait, the band got my attention, and kept it throughout, even though I didn’t know many of the songs. It convinced me I needed to get more of their music.

Shortly thereafter I got their recently-released UB40album. (The one I mentioned before that hadn’t been getting attention.) I immediately recognized the first track on the album as the song that had started (and ended) the concert. If you’re paying attention (and if you’ll recall I told you to pay attention way back on Day 1) you should be able to figure out that song was today’s entry, “Dance With The Devil”

It’s a horn-infused instrumental (with reprise at the end of the album) that may very well be the best song on UB40. It was the start of a journey that culminated in my acquisition of a dozen albums, a bunch of singles, and a bootleg or two. (Ssshh. Don’t tell.)

So after all that, can I say that relegation to the back seat was worth the discovery of a band that has provided me who-knows-how-many hours of enjoyment?

No. No it wasn’t.

* Another change from the original choice last year. The original was “Charm” by Tony Banks. I love that song, but since no one but Genesis fans know that Tony Banks exists, I decided to go with an artist that was at least a little bit mainstream. I’m also trying to use songs and artists that you can actually get easily, thus the links to Amazon, and Tony Banks doesn’t fall into that category. Most of his stuff is available on CD, but not digitally. That said, if you still use CDs, I’d encourage you to check him out.

365 Day Song Challenge: Day 13 – “Right Here Waiting”

Posted on by Joe Parker

Day 13.A song that reminds you of a past love

“Right Here Waiting” — Richard Marx

It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that the transition from high school to college is a big one.  Especially when you leave home to do it. Nothing against those people who live at home during college, but it’s not the same as packing up, being away from your parents and getting that first glimpse of what it’s like to live life on your own.

Granted, I was only an hour away from home, but it was far enough away that going home at the drop of a hat wasn’t really an option. Especially with no car. (Why is it that an hour drive in 1989 seemed so much longer and more difficult than an hour drive does now?)

The transition is that much harder when you’re in a relationship. There are so many things changing in your life, and yet there are so many things (like, say, a girlfriend) that you want to hang on to. As we know, that’s not the easiest thing to do for a variety of reasons. I’d be interested to see statistics on how many relationships that are underway when people head off to college actually survive. I’m not saying it can’t happen, because I know people who have done it, but it’s tough without a doubt. The odds simply aren’t good.

In my case, my girlfriend was an underclassman, so I was off to college and she was staying put.

When she handed me the tape of this song, I had never heard it, despite it being the week after it hit #1 on the charts. I was a Top 40 snob at the time (I guess I still am, pretty much). As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I’m not really someone who always pays attention to the lyrics, but with this song, it’s pretty much impossible not to.

Talk about songs that rip your heart out. Given the situation, she couldn’t have picked a better (or worse, depending on your point of view) song. Even though it was Richard Marx’s voice, it was her saying these things to me. It was like he knew exactly what we were going through, albeit with the roles reversed. And I guess, since he wrote this song as a message to his wife while she was filming a movie in South Africa, he did.

Long story short, the relationship couldn’t handle the distance and the changes we were both going through. By the following spring we’d broken up. (Richard Marx and his wife still appear to be together, though, so that’s nice.)

These days I rarely think about it, but when this song does pop up, I’m reminded of those days. It’s a snapshot piece, perfectly summing up that point in time. You get those sometimes.

Okay, having said all that, I hope we’re coming to the end of all these sad, doom and gloom topics and getting into something more lighthearted. Sheesh! Songs that rip your heart out.  Shameless self-pity. “Hold On My Heart.” (Well, that last one doesn’t make me sad, it just is sad.) The person who put this list together might just need therapy…

365 Day Song Challenge: Day 12 – “Let It Rock”

Posted on by Joe Parker

Day 12. A song you play when you’re getting ready to get your confidence up

“Let It Rock” — Kevin Rudolf featuring Lil Wayne

It happens without warning.

Sometimes it’s in the afternoon, sometimes just before bed. Sometimes it’s right in the middle of Downton Abbey.

You know what I’m talking about: that crushing blow of doubt that suddenly makes you wonder if you’re good enough, and smart enough, and doggone it, do people really like you? The slightest thing can trigger it: A bad review. A traffic light turning yellow when you least expect it. Sun spots. Pow! You’re a quivering heap of self-loathing. (Once it even happened when I didn’t get a trophy for participation in the softball league. No, we didn’t score a single run all season, but shouldn’t we all be winners?)

You know you can’t stay like that, so you have to nip it in the bud. You must stop it right then.

And here’s how. I’ve figured out the sure-fire cure. You see, after seconds of research (read: I saw some football highlights on SportsCenter), I determined that the only way to build up your confidence is by being part of a huddle of guys jumping up and down and chanting. (Sorry ladies, you’ll have to figure out your own solution.)

So I hired eleven guys. Because a dozen seemed too many and ten wasn’t enough. They’re on call 24/7 and are required—by contract—to drop everything and come to my house whenever I text them the message Feeling poopy! :-(

They have 12 minutes to get here. Once they arrive, we gather in… I don’t know, let’s say the dining room if you’re that bent on the details… and then huddle up.

First we pray. Then I start playing “Let It Rock.” The mood changes almost instantly. After a verse, we start swaying. By the first chorus we’re all head-bopping in unison. By the Lil Wayne rap section, we’re bouncing up and down and doing that whole Arsenio Hall woot-woot hand thing. When that’s done and the music starts up again we all bump chests and file out of the room, each one of us touching the quote printed above the door. (It’s from Rex Ryan and says “Put your best foot forward. Can you please put your best foot forward?”)

Mission accomplished, we slap each other’s butts and mutter “Good huddle, good huddle” and then I tell everyone to get the hell out. The entire process takes four minutes. Okay, sixteen if you count travel time.

Once again brimming with confidence, I can happily return to the couch, secure in the knowledge that I’m da man while I enjoy the Dowager Countess verbally bitch-slapping someone. (And don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean… You know.)