The Other Ray Charles

August 5th, 2016

As has been noted here several times over the years, my dad wasn’t a big music fan. He’d listen to the radio some – mostly in his old 1952 Ford or when he was puttering at his workbench in the basement – with the dial tuned either to WCCO from the Twin Cities or to the country sounds of WVAL from nearby Sauk Rapids.

And after we got the portable RCA stereo in mid-1964 – it sat awkwardly on the floor in the living room or on a shelf in the dining room until the rec room in the basement was finished in 1967 – Dad bought a few records, but not many. When we cleared stuff out of the house on Kilian in 2004, I brought home fifty-some records, most of them classical recordings Dad got through the Musical Heritage Society, the ones he said that my sister and I would be glad to have someday. (He was right.)

Along with those came a number of easy listening albums, several of which I recalled clearly from the mid-1960s. I even knew where he bought them.

If you were to ask anyone who lived through the 1960s in St. Cloud where the center of downtown was, I’d guess most folks would answer “Dan Marsh Drugs.” Opened in the 1930s at the corner of St. Germain – St. Cloud’s equivalent of Main Street – and Sixth Avenue, Dan MarshDan Marsh Drugs cropped was where we – and a lot of other Cloudians – went for prescriptions and other health aids; for cigarettes and pipe tobacco and smoking accessories, for soap and perfume and similar sundries; for cameras, film and flashbulbs; for school supplies; for gifts for any occasion; and, especially after the store expanded in the mid-1960s, for Hallmark greeting cards and similar ephemera.

When you tired of shopping, you could grab refreshments in the coffee shop. (For decades, until the store closed during the 1980s, the coffee shop was also the place for many students from two nearby high schools – St. Cloud Tech and Cathedral – to gather after school for cherry cokes and French fries.)

And you could buy records there, too.

There weren’t a lot of LPs at Dan Marsh, and they were generally on what I’d consider second-line labels. I wrote long ago about Dad buying an album called Ringo at Dan Marsh, knowing I liked the Lorne Greene single; that album, and a couple others I remember, were on the Wyncote label. Another that I pulled off the shelf this morning – covers of themes from spy movies – was on the Design label.

And one day he brought home an album that sounded promising, titled Young Lovers In Far Away Places by the Ray Charles Singers, this one on the Somerset label. Now, I would have been eleven or twelve at the time, but for as little as I cared about pop music, I knew about Ray Charles. I’d likely seen him on television one time or another, and I although I couldn’t have identified his music as soul or R&B, I knew I liked what he did. So I was prepared to like the record.

(I already liked the jacket, with its minimalist design and the photo of the pretty and clearly sophisticated blonde giving her companion an unmistakably sultry look.)

Dad put the record on the stereo. The first track was “Far Away Places,” and it was soft and sweet with pretty voices and pretty backing and not at all what I would have expected – even with my limited musical awareness – from Ray Charles. And the whole record was like that, soft and pretty. I was confused, but I did nothing to clarify things. I just ignored the record. I doubt that I put it on the turntable again, or even thought much about it until Dad’s records came to me in 2004.

And then, as I went through Dad’s records, I looked at the jacket and the pretty blonde and the name of the group, and I nodded. By then, I’d become aware that there was another Ray Charles, one who wasn’t a soul and R&B singer but who was instead a songwriter, arranger and conductor, mostly for television. His Ray Charles Singers, according to Wikipedia, had performed on Perry Como’s television show (and on Como’s records, too), and began recording their own albums in 1959. “Due to advances in recording technology,” says Wikipedia, “they were able to create a softer sound than had been heard before and this was the birth of what has been called ‘easy listening’.”

Well, I think there were more midwives to the birth of easy listening than the Ray Charles Singers. I think of 101 Strings, formed in 1957, and of the Ray Conniff Singers, which began recording in 1959. Jackie Gleason’s orchestra was releasing records in the mid-1950s, and Mantovani’s recording career began in the late 1940s. And those are just off the top of my head. But there’s no doubt that the work of the other Ray Charles and his singers fit right into the easy listening music that a good chunk of the American public liked to hear at home.

And I like Young Lovers In Far Away Places today far more than I did in 1965. (And, of course, I still like the other Ray Charles, too, the one who sang “I’ve Got A Woman” and all that soul and R&B stuff.)

Here’s “Far Away Places” by the Ray Charles Singers.

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‘Kill That Roach . . .’

August 3rd, 2016

I’ve dissected at least a couple of times the changes in my life during the summer of 1976 (here and here), a summer that is somehow now forty years in the past. I’ve written about how odd it felt at the start of that July to be living on the North Side of St. Cloud instead of my native East Side and about the questions and concerns that I carried along with my books and clothing as I moved from one side of the Mississippi River to the other.

And I’ve written about the music that brings back memories of that summer, reminders of that move and of my cramped room in my new home.

But one thing I didn’t really think about until very recently was the change in my music listening habits. When I was living at my folks’ place on Kilian Boulevard, my music source was – and this is an estimate – half from my LPs in the basement rec room, not very many of them very recent, and half from radios and/or jukeboxes in various other places: my room, friends’ homes, various restaurants and bars and Atwood Center at St. Cloud State.

But when I moved across town, I left my LPs at Kilian Boulevard. Yeah, there was a turntable in the living room in my new place, and the three guys who were living there had some albums on the bricks and boards nearby. But I’d visited the place enough to know that – like many low-rent residences occupied by students in college towns across the country – our place had pretty much an open door policy. Security had never been a major concern.

Now, I don’t know how many LPs had walked out the door of the place on Seventeenth Avenue under the arms of sticky-fingered visitors over the couple of years I’d been visiting off and on. But until I had a better idea of how widely ajar the place’s open door actually was – I didn’t know how diligently the doors were locked or who else out there might have keys – I wasn’t going to bring my albums over and risk having them wander out the door.

(As the guys I knew moved out, the number of albums on the living room shelves diminished, and it wasn’t until quite late in my tenure on Seventeenth Avenue that I brought over from the East Side maybe ten of my favorite LPs, scrawling my name on the top right corner of the front cover of each of them.)

Until then, I listened to the radio, sometimes when hanging out in the living room with the other guys and with whatever company we had, and sometimes when closeted in my room with my two cats (and on frequent occasion, my girlfriend). The radio in the living room was likely tuned to the FM side of a local Top 40 station or maybe to the Twin Cities’ album rocker KQRS. The radio in my room was generally tuned to WCCO’s FM station, which played a quirky mix of music that’s not easy to describe.

(Regular reader Yah Shure explained it this way a few years ago: “WCCO-FM’s hybrid format was an attempt to create a younger, hipper, more music-intensive version of its full-service-giant parent AM, which wasn’t a bad plan for a market that hadn’t yet fully awakened to the existence of the FM band. It was a current-based blend of soft rock, MOR, pop, singer-songwriter . . . even a touch of jazz lite. The non-rock hits were well represented, but FM 103’s overall musical scope was pretty adventurous, with plenty of album cuts and untested singles that fit a particular ‘sound,’ whether they’d charted or not.”)

So all of that was what I heard during those months on the North Side, a mix of mostly current stuff. And of course, a great deal of music I might not have heard then has come to me since, so most of the records listed in the Billboard Hot 100 from this week in 1976, are familiar. It’s more fun these days, however, to look for the unfamiliar. So, dropping down to the bottom of the chart, the Bubbling Under section, I find at No. 109, the next-to-last spot on the chart, a record that I’m pretty certain I’d never heard until this morning

That’s not unusual; despite my best efforts, there’s a lot of music out there that’s popped into the charts that’s never reached these ears. But a look at Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles told me that there’s something remarkable about “Kill That Roach” by a Miami-based disco band called simply Miami.

What caught my eye about “Kill That Roach” this morning is that the record bubbled under the Hot 100 for thirteen weeks – all of August, September and October 1976 – and never got any higher than No. 103. Maybe I’m utterly sideways here, but I can’t imagine that too many records in the Hot 100 era bubbled under for that many weeks without breaking into the actual Hot 100.

It’s maybe nothing special, a dance record that’s in the same vein as many others of the time, but I wouldn’t have minded hearing it come out of the speaker late some night as my girlfriend and our cats kept me company on the North Side.

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‘Open The Door, Richard . . .’

July 29th, 2016

Just to show that I’m upright – and to celebrate that there’s a working handle on the door of the Versa – I thought we’d consider Bob Dylan’s “Open The Door, Homer” as covered by Thunderclap Newman.

Best known for the No. 37 hit “Something In The Air,” which was used in the 1969 movie The Magic Christian, Thunderclap Newman was a group assembled by the Who’s Pete Townshend in what Wikipedia says was “a bid to showcase the talents of John ‘Speedy’ Keen, Andy ‘Thunderclap’ Newman and Jimmy McCulloch.” (Townshend played bass for the group under the name of Bijou Drains.)

“Open The Door, Homer” showed up on the group’s 1970 album Hollywood Dream. I love Newman’s herky-jerky piano solo, similar to the one he supplies on “Something In The Air.” And not being interested in digging even lightly into Dylanology today, I’ll just say that I don’t know why the song title is addressed to Homer when the lyrics address Richard.

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‘Hard To Handle’

July 27th, 2016

When the Texas Gal went to the car – our Nissan Versa – after a business appointment two days ago, she pulled the door handle like she and I have done thousands of times in the nine years we’ve had the car. And the handle came off in her hand.

I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what it looked like. I know, though, what I would have looked like had it happened to me: I would have stood there for a second, looking dumbly from the black handle in my hand to the empty space on the car door. “Huh,” I would have thought, processing.

And then I, like she did, would have thought, “Well, it was going to happen sometime.”

As is the case with many cars these days – with key fobs that carry electronic openers – the driver’s door on the Versa is the only one with a lock that can be opened with the key. And about four to five months ago, the little plastic cowling around the keyhole started to break; it would come out of alignment a little, and we’d push it back in. And the handle was a little loose. We knew we were going to have to deal with it eventually, and we put it our agendas, but it was a littler lower on our lists than maybe it should have been.

This week, however, with the Texas Gal standing in the street in front of a client’s home holding a door handle that was no longer doing its job, it became a whole lot more important to get repairs done. As it happened, our other car, a Chevy Cavalier, was at the nearby tire place that day for an oil change and some minor other work, so when the Texas Gal – who got into the Versa via the passenger door, of course – came home, she and I headed down the street, picked up the Cavalier and dropped off the Versa to wait for parts.

I should hear sometime today that the Versa’s door is fixed, and I’ll walk the half- mile down to the tire place and pick it up. And we can hope that any more automotive ailments will wait a while longer.

A total of thirty-six tracks show up in the RealPlayer when I search for “handle.” Nine of them come from Gene Chandler, with the most famous of those, of course, being 1962’s “Duke of Earl.” There are also tracks from four lesser-known Chandlers: Dillard (“Rain and Snow,” a 1975 track from a 2002 Smithsonian Folkways collection), Howard (“Wampus Cat,” an originally unreleased track from a 1957 Sun session), Len (“Touch Talk,” a Columbia single from 1967) and Wayland (“Little Lover/Playboy” on the 4 Star label from 1958).

That leaves twenty-two tracks with “handle” in their titles, ranging along the time line from 1941’s “Panhandle Shuffle” by the Sons Of The West to Leon Russell’s 2013 version of “Too Hot To Handle.” We’ll stop somewhere near the middle for Tony Joe White’s 1970 cover of “Hard To Handle.”

The song was written by Allen Jones, Alvertis Isbell and Otis Redding and was first recorded by Redding. One of numerous releases that came after Redding’s death in December 1967, “Hard To Handle” was the B-side to “Amen” and, on its own, went to No. 51 on the Billboard Hot 100 and to No. 38 on the magazine’s R&B chart during the summer of 1968. (“Amen” went Nos. 36 and 15, respectively.)

The song’s been covered numerous time – Second Hand Songs lists thirty-five covers – and two other versions charted along the way (at least through 2008, which is the last year in my copy of Top Pop Singles): Patti Drew’s 1968 cover went to No. 93 on the Hot 100 and to No. 40 on the R&B chart, and the Black Crowes released their cover twice, once in the autumn of 1990, when it went to No. 45 and then again during the summer of 1991, when it got to No. 26.

Some of the other covers of the tune have come from Tom Jones, the Grateful Dead, Brenda Lee, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Toots Hibbert, Gov’t Mule and – always one of my oddball favorites – the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.

Here’s Tony Joe’s version, which was an album track on 1970’s Tony Joe:

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Saturday Single No. 505

July 23rd, 2016

Well, pickling season has come.

The Texas Gal is in the kitchen, sorting a bushel of pickling cucumbers she picked up at the local farmer’s market this morning. Yes, she has cucumbers in her garden in the side yard, but just to make sure she has enough for an early batch of pickles each summer, she orders a bushel from a woman from Browerville, a burg of about 800 folks about sixty-five miles northwest of here.

The vendor called yesterday and said those cucumbers would be available at the farmer’s market today, and the Texas Gal brought them home a little bit ago. By that time, I’d gotten the canner and its accessories and about eighteen quart-sized canning jars up from the fruit cellar. And in a couple of hours or so, the smell of pickling brine will fill the house, and by sometime this afternoon, the first batches of pickles – combining the Browerville cucumbers with the first ones this season from our garden – will come out of the canner to cool.

It’s remarkable to realize that until we moved into the house not quite eight years ago, the Texas Gal had never gardened and never done any canning. She learned quickly, even with some missteps along the way, both in the garden and in the kitchen, and one side of our fruit cellar is almost always pretty well stocked. Well, the shelf space devoted to pickles is pretty empty right now – one lone jar of Hot Texas Mustard Pickles remains from last year – but that’s intentional: Over the winter and into the spring, we gave away everything else we had left on the shelves from the past few years to clear the space for this year’s batches.

It’s not just pickles, of course. Over the past few years, she’s canned green beans, wax beans, tomato sauce, spaghetti sauce, chili starter and various relishes that are staples here. She’s also tried some things that weren’t as successful, like the sweet and sour curried vegetables from last year. It was an interesting idea, but the reality was a little less tasty than we hoped.

This year’s canning efforts, however, will be mostly devoted to pickles. There will be green beans and wax beans galore from her portion of the community garden, but most of those will go to the Dream Center, a residence for ex-felons on the North Side that we help support through our Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. The same holds true for a lot of the tomatoes we’ll get, although I imagine she’ll make and freeze some pasta sauce, as the large batch she made and froze two years ago is now gone.

But that will come later in the summer, probably in mid-August at the earliest. Today and tomorrow, it’s pickling time. I’ll contribute where I can, but my role is mostly limited – as I’ve noted here in other summers – to the literal heavy lifting, moving the filled canner from burner to burner and lugging jars of cooled, sealed and labeled pickles to the fruit cellar as the last part of the process.

So with all that, it seemed like a good time to look for a tune with “kitchen” in its title. I dismissed twenty-seven versions of “Come On In My Kitchen” and looked further. And I came upon “Mama’s In The Kitchen” by Toni Childs. It’s from her 2008 album Keep The Faith, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

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Posted in 2008, Life As She Is, Saturday Single, Video | 1 Comment »

‘And Wondering Why . . .’

July 22nd, 2016

Last evening, as I made dinner – a classic Midwestern meal of a sauce of cream soups, milk, canned chicken, onions and a few other things over elbow macaroni – the iPod chugged along atop the repurposed bookcase we call Pantry Boy. Among the twenty or so tracks the iPod offered as I chopped, mixed and stirred was Richard Harris’ “MacArthur Park” from 1968.

As has been my habit for some time now, I shared the lengthy list of tracks – divided this time into two portions – at Facebook last evening, highlighting first Joe Brown’s performance of “I’ll See You In My Dreams” from the 2002 Concert for George and later the Rascals’ 1969 hit, “People Got To Be Free.” The first post got little comment, but there was a lot of positive response to the second set. And then a friend of mine said she’d never gotten “MacArthur Park” and asked for insight.

I responded, perhaps a little pertly, “Surrealism, memory and regret.” She said she got those things from the tone of the music but she didn’t get the lyrics. I think the lyrics as well as the tone of the music carry all of that. So I wrote:

Well, unless I’m mistaken in what I remember this morning, the only part of the lyrics that needs any explication is the part about the cake, and my thought has always – well, since I became an adult – been that the cake represents the love of his life, now gone for reasons beyond their control, with the sweet things melting away in the rain of troubles. Otherwise, I don’t think the lyrics are all that obtuse; they tell a story of simple joys, loss, hope and grief: “After all the loves of my life, I’ll be thinking of you . . . and wondering why.”

And for good measure, I posted the comments I made more than five years ago when I included Harris’ version of the song in my Ultimate Jukebox:

I think “MacArthur Park” is one of those records that has no middle ground. Folks either love it or find it ridiculous. Obviously, I’m I the first group, and have been from the first time I heard it. (One day in the summer of 1968, my sister called me to the radio to hear “this stupid song that goes on forever about leaving the cake out in the rain.”) I recognize its flaws: Harris’ vocals are overblown. The lyrics – even without the cake in the rain – are overwritten. The backing, with its lengthy instrumental passages, is too big for the song. But you know what? From where I hear the record, every one of those things – the over-reaching vocal, the over-written lyrics, the overwhelming backing – is a virtue for a record that went to No. 2 during the summer of 1968. Baroque and excessive “MacArthur Park” may be, but it’s also brilliant.

My friend later thanked me for my comments, said she generally agreed with me about the tunes I list at Facebook, and added that this time, she agreed with my sister.

The exchange got me thinking about the song, of course, and went to the RealPlayer to see how times “MacArthur Park” showed up. Turns out it’s nineteen times. Three of those are from Harris: the original mono mix from the 45 and two copies of the album track, one from Harris’ 1968 release A Tramp Shining and the other from a box set of work by the famed session musicians called the Wrecking Crew.

The rest run the gamut from Ray Conniff & The Singers to Waylon Jennings with the Kimberlys; from Enoch Light to the Three Degrees; from Ferrante & Teicher and the 101 Strings to the Brazilian Tropical Orchestra and the Ukulele Orchestra Of Great Britain. One major version missing from the digital stacks is Donna Summer’s cover of the tune, which spent three weeks at No. 1 in Billboard in November 1978. That’s a gap I will remedy soon, even though I’ve never been fond of Summers’ version.

I think over the next week or so, I’ll do some digging and find out what the hell Jimmy Webb was thinking about when he wrote the song. (I noticed a listing for a piece online in which Webb discusses the lyrics, and I’ll have to check that out.) And we’ll dig into some of the covers I have on the shelves. We’ll start that process with the instrumental version offered as an album track in 1970 by the Assembled Multitude, the group of Philadelphia studio musicians whose version of “Overture From Tommy (A Rock Opera)” went to No. 16 in Billboard that summer.

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‘Sleep’

July 19th, 2016

I’ve not been sleeping well lately. Folks who know me well might think that I’m being kept up either by fussing cats or by worries about the future of the Republic. Well, it’s neither of those (although I am concerned, as I indicated last week, with the direction of public affairs and it is true that any of the three cats can contribute minor bits of mayhem at any time).

No, it’s medications. A combination of meds required for the time being limits my sleep and leaves me somewhat zombied during the daytimes. That’s going to go on for another ten days or so, which means it’s tolerable; there is an end point visible to the fuzzy daze in which I frequently find myself.

It’s not utterly disabling: I just need to be a bit more careful and a bit more mindful of things that need to get done during the day. As always, lists help. And I’m off to make another one of those in just moments. Before I do, I’m going to run at random through the 300 or so the tracks on the digital shelves that have the word “sleep” in their titles and see what I find.

And I come across the lovely and very brief – 2:03 – “River Of Sleep” by the group Maggie’s Farm, fronted by the duo of Allison MacLeod and Claudia Russell. The group’s 1992 album, Glory Road, remains one of my faves among the CDs I found on a budget rack at a St. Paul bookstore during the spring of 2000. A few years ago, I noted that Glory Road was the only album released by Maggie’s Farm although MacLeod and Russell have released solo albums since. I said then, “I’ve seen the album classified as Americana, and that fits, I guess, but whatever you call it, it’s just a darned good album.”

“River Of Sleep” was written by McLeod and Mark Lee (who does some vocal work on the album and, I think, contributes the lead here):

Late at night, the world is quiet
It’s cold outside but you’re alright
Nothing can hurt you
Float down the river of sleep

The sun’s behind the trees
The nightbirds sing sweet melodies
Nothing can hurt you
Float down the river of sleep

Close your eyes
Dream of peace
For nothing can hurt you
Float down the river of sleep

Close your eyes
Dream of peace
For nothing can hurt you
Float down a river and sleep

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Posted in 1992, Life As She Is, Single, Video | 1 Comment »

Saturday Single No. 504

July 16th, 2016

After another harsh week around portions of the world – terror in Nice, a failed coup in Turkey, political craziness here at home and who knows what else in other places – I was looking for something to make me feel better. Music works, more often than not, so I decided to take a look at what I was likely hearing on my radio during this week in 1970.

As I’ve noted before, that year was my one full calendar year of focused Top 40 listening. Until late summer 1969, I hadn’t cared much; come the autumn of 1971, I moved in the direction of albums and progressive rock. So it’s a year I look at as a touchstone. Given that, what did I find looking back at KDWB’s “6+30” from mid-July of 1970?

Well, as the link shows, a lot of familiar stuff, records I’ve heard over and over and over in the years since then. Not that I dislike them; some of the stuff on the survey from the week of July 20, 1970, is among my favorite music. But I don’t know that after nine years of blogging, I have much more to say about those favorites.

And then I spotted a listing of a record I’ve not heard in years. I don’t know that it was among my favorites back then, and I’ve not thought often of it since. It sat at No. 13, heading up from No. 20; it would peak on KDWB at No. 7 where it would spend the next two week: “A Song of Joy” by Miguel Rios. (It did better on KDWB than it did nationally in Billboard, where it peaked at No. 14.)

And the single – with music based on the Fourth Movement of Ludwig von Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and words (credited on the record label only to “Orbe”) that echo, if not exactly replicate Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” which Beethoven used for the chorale portion of the movement – is worth a listen this morning.

Two years after Rios’ single was a best-seller in much of Europe as well as here, an adaptation of Beethoven’s music was adopted as a European anthem. Given Europe’s travails in the past week – indeed in the past year – it’s an easy choice to make “A Song of Joy” this week’s Saturday Single.

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‘Utopia’

July 15th, 2016

As the Texas Gal and I pulled boxes off shelves and out of piles in the basement the other week, we sorted our finds into three categories: Stuff we could sell at last week’s garage sale, stuff we would either keep or take to antique dealers/collectors, and stuff we could just pitch. And as we pulled and sorted, we caught glimpses of bits of our lives long gone (like the orange backpack).

And one of the boxes in the last pile we tackled brought back memories of the only video game system I’ve ever owned: Mattel’s Intellivision. Though the game console is long gone, the box held the ten games I got to go along with the console back in the early 1980s.

Intellivision b y Evan Amos

By today’s standards, it was a laughable system, but in 1980, its graphics and the wide variety of games available made it pretty remarkable. The complexity of the games was pretty cool, too. Take the NFL Football game, for instance. With the key pad on the controller – into which one slipped a plastic insert – you could call a run or pass from any of nine formations. The running plays were pretty simple, but for a pass, you had to then choose one of two receivers – there were only five players on each team – and then choose one of nine areas on the field where the pass would be thrown.

The gold disc in the controller was, in effect, the joystick. Only one player on each team would be under your control. On defense, it was, I think, a linebacker. On offense, it would be the running back or the quarterback/receiver combination. You’d control the quarterback until you hit the “pass” button, and then you’d control the receiver, moving him to the zone where the ball was thrown.

What did the other four players on each team do? Well, the other offensive players were programmed to block the defenders, and the defenders were programmed to go to wherever the ball was.

Yes, it was the gaming equivalent of the Model T, but it’s worth recalling that just five years earlier, we’d all been amazed by Pong. Given that Intellivision increased the number of moving parts and the complexity of the games, it was a great system. And as soon as I saw it in at my friend Warren’s house back in 1981 or 1982, I knew I had to have one.

It wasn’t cheap. One web site I checked this morning said the original price in 1980 was $299. I don’t remember mine being quite that expensive; I think I laid down about $200 bucks for mine (the equivalent of about $585 these days).  And of course, there was the cost of the games. The console came with a Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack cartridge, which was kind of lame. I eventually bought nine other games:

NFL Football
NHL Hockey
NASL Soccer
Skiing
Tennis
Backgammon
Space Battle
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
Utopia

I also remember playing baseball and a game called Sub Hunt at Warren’s. Since I didn’t always have someone around to play against – the Other Half was not at all interested in video games – I enjoyed most the games one could play solo: Skiing, Space Battle, Dungeons & Dragons and Utopia. (I could practice football by myself, especially the passing, in kind of a scrimmage mode, and I could play hockey and soccer solo, after a fashion, controlling the offense for one team until the defense got control of the puck or ball and then switching controllers; that was kind of lame, yes, but it gave me practice in passing and shooting.)

My favorite was probably Utopia, which was designed for either one or two players. You’d control the government of an island, investing gold bars to create farms, school, hospitals, forts and other establishments Intellivision Utopiaand sending out a fishing fleet to gain food and revenue. On a random basis, rain would cross your farms and your crops would flourish. Random hurricanes also came along, destroying your buildings and crops. Playing solo, the goal was simply to govern well and accumulate points. In a two-person game, trying to outscore your opponent, you could also invest in rebels to attack the other island. (In a solo game, hurricanes or the failure of the crops or fishing fleet could result in rebels popping up on your own island.)

I played the various games – solo and with Warren and a few other folks – for about four or five years. Then one day in early 1985, I hauled my console to a friend’s house in Columbia, Missouri, to share it with him. We plugged in the Skiing game and everything showed up on the screen except the skier. Puzzled, I switched to soccer, and everything was there except the ball. Something in the console’s innards had failed. I put the game back in its box and we watched basketball on TV.

A few years later, no wiser as to what had gone wrong with my Intellivision and aware that it was outdated, I threw the console out. I packed the game cartridges in a box, thinking someone might want them someday. And today, they sit on a table here in the EITW studios. I suppose I could try to sell them on Ebay or a similar site. Or I could just give them to Goodwill and let the folks there puzzle things out.

I found in the mp3 stacks two pieces with the title “Utopia.” One was a 2000 recording from the album Voices Of Life by the Bulgarian Women’s Choir. The other came from a self-titled 1972 album by Mother Night, a Latin funk/rock band from New York City (according to the blog Hippydjkit). Here’s the Mother Night track:

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‘A New Adventure’

July 13th, 2016

He was almost certainly homeless, dressed in a tattered and stained yellow long-sleeved shirt and what I think were bicycle pants, with the left leg shorter than the right. He carried a scuffed and dirty red athletic bag and a plastic bag from a grocery store, the latter holding at least two bottles of water.

He was heading over to visit a friend, he said, at the River Crest Apartments, a residence for chronic inebriates just down Lincoln Avenue from our place, and he stopped by our garage sale on the way. He looked to be in his forties, and he spoke with the same vagueness, the same lack of focus, that we’ve heard from the folks who live at River Crest since the place opened about six years ago.

He talked about a wife and oddities in their lives, but it was hard to tell as he spoke whether those were things that had happened in the last few years or long ago. Later on, the Texas Gal and I guessed it was the latter.

As he wandered around our small offering of things for sale, he noticed a magnifying glass on a stand with a flexible neck, like a gooseneck lamp. It was priced at five bucks, and he picked it up, and then his gaze fell on an orange backpack. “Oh,” he said, “that looks like a good one.”

It was a good backpack, bought in November 1973 in a sporting goods store in Fredericia, Denmark. When I’d headed to Denmark that September, I’d brought with me a light rucksack, thinking that it would suffice when I headed out hitchhiking or riding trains across Western Europe. One four-day trip to the West German harbor city of Kiel told me it wasn’t big enough or rugged enough, and I told my parents so in a letter.

They responded by sending me $35 – the equivalent of about $190 today – to get a backpack in time for my planned early December travels to Brussels and Amsterdam, and sometime in late November, I went to the store recommended by my Danish host family and bought myself an orange nylon backpack with a silver aluminum frame. That’s what our ragged customer saw offered for sale last week.

It was only a little difficult to put the backpack into the garage sale. I hadn’t used it since 1975, when I took a bus trip from St. Cloud to Kingston, Ontario, to visit a young lady I’d met during my European travels. We didn’t match well on this side of the Atlantic, and I never heard from her again. Nor had I used the backpack. Protected by an old pillowcase, it had sat on a shelf in my parents’ basement until Mom sold the house on Kilian Boulevard in 2004. Since then, it had sat in a closet in our apartment and then on a shelf in our basement. About a week before the sale, the Texas Gal asked what I wanted to do with it. I acknowledged with a sigh that my backpacking days were long gone, and we priced it at five bucks.

As we sat at our small table watching our visitor examine the backpack, the Texas Gal asked me, “Do you want to just give it to him?”

I shook my head. I was willing to sell the backpack, but to just give it away? “No,” I said.

After all, it had been my companion for much of what I’ve called the greatest formative experience of my life. On my December travels, I had carried it and it had carried me as I hitchhiked to Hamburg and Hanover in West Germany and then rode buses and trains to Brussels and Amsterdam and back to Fredericia. In March and April, I traveled more than 11,000 miles on a rail pass, and the backpack rode my shoulders from train stations to hostels and cheap hotels all over Western Europe, as far south as Rome and as far north as Narvik, keeping safe all the things I needed as I traveled.

Our ragged visitor moved on to look at other stuff we had for sale, but I was looking back. By the time one of my trips – the longest one, in March and early April 1974 – had ended, the backpack carried not only my clothing and sundries but four pieces of contraband: a liter mug pilfered from the Hofbräuhaus in Munich, a smaller beer glass lifted from a restaurant in Nuremburg, and two delicate painted tea glasses liberated from an Arabic restaurant in Paris. The mug and the beer glass were late additions to the backpack’s contents, but I still marvel that the two tea glasses – they now sit atop a bookshelf in our dining room – survived more than a month of travel, protected by nothing more than a sweater or other soft garments.

As I looked back, our visitor returned to the backpack. “That sure is a nice one,” he said.

I think I sighed. And I said to the Texas Gal, “Go ahead. Give it to him.”

She did. I had to show him how to work the flap and its ties, and then we loaded his bags into it and helped him slip it on his shoulders. He picked up his new magnifying glass and headed for River Crest. I watched him as he went, the vivid orange of his new backpack easily visible until he went into the building about a half a block away.

“He needed it,” the Texas Gal said.

“I know,” I managed to say. “And it’s gone on a new adventure.”

Here’s the best track I could find among the nineteen tracks in the RealPlayer that had the word “adventure” in their titles. It’s “Adventures On The Way” by the English group Prelude, and it’s from the group’s 1974 album, After The Gold Rush.

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Posted in 1974, East Side, Life As She Is, Single | 2 Comments »

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