creativenachos.com Blog

Photo by Natasha Reilly

The thermometer hit 75 degrees in the Big City on Thursday and you know what that meant….Spring Fever. The first day of Spring, the first real day of it, always inspires me. The warm sunshine wakens me from my winter slumber and I notice things like the beautiful, new buds on the trees, people walking slower, kids playing Frisbee with their dogs and daffodils everywhere.

On days like this, I want to throw on my iPod, walk through the park and listen to some tunes. The same tunes grab hold of me at the same time each year- weird. They are:

- People Are Strange by The Doors – I loved this song the very first time I heard it. Maybe because when I was in grammar school, this song somehow made me feel like it was cool to be strange.

- Thank You by Led Zeppelin – I found the lyrics to this song in a friend’s yearbook and wrote them on my binder. I didn’t even know they were from a song. Then along came a person who would write the title of the song on that binder and change my life forever.

- What I Got by Sublime – My star-filled friend and old roommate, Claire, and I used to sing this in the morning before work and late on Friday nights….”Livin’ with Claire dawg’s the only way to stay sane….”

- Lover Lay Down by Dave Matthews Band – This song came out during my dating days. It made sense to me.

- Wonderwall by Oasis – Once upon a time, I needed to be saved. This song was popular when someone did.

- Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding – I have loved this song since I was a little girl for no reason, other than I adore the image it conjures up of summer and sittin’ by the ocean.

- All I Want is You by U2 – love this song. That’s all I have to say.

- Bright Side of the Road by Van Morrison – this song makes me want to dance around.

- Amber by 311 – this song makes me think of Hawaii; I love that damn place.

- 32 Flavors Ani DiFranco’s version – I dig the idea behind this song. “I am 32 flavors and then some”…oh yeah!

- These are the Days by Natalie Merchant – this reminds me of my closest and most hilarious friends and our own addition to the refrain when we would sing…you and you and you and me!

- Who’s That Girl? by Madonna – embarrassing admission but for some reason I love to hear this song when the weather gets warm and I will never be able to explain why. It is a complete mystery to me.

What song(s) do you want to hear right now?
 

My daughter traipses through the apartment carrying Curious George as though she has just saved him from a near disaster and I am reminded of the many characters that captured my imagination when I was young. Specifically, the idea of having to “save” a character brings a memory and music to mind.

I adored James Bond, Roger Moore’s James Bond. That’s why on a trip to the record store with my Mom I begged her to get the James Bond’s Greatest Hits album. This was followed by a jaunt to the grocery store where I spotted it.  There, hanging just above the frozen vegetables was the perfect accessory for James Bond games, a water gun with a sleek black handle and shiny white plastic muzzle. Although my Mom didn’t approve of guns, I knew I had to convince her to get it for me.

“No,” she responded, almost instantly when I asked for it.
“Why?”

If I understood her thought process then I might be able to make this happen.

“You know I don’t like guns and that looks like a real gun,” she said, moving the cart further down the aisle.

I slowed my pace, turned around and looked at the gun again. Suddenly I could see the way to win the argument.

“But Mom,” I said, running up to her and throwing myself in front of her cart.
“Look at the point of it. It’s bright red!”

The end had a red tip; a clear indication to anyone that this was not a real gun.

“Please Mom, please!”

She tried to get me to move but I held onto the cart.
 
“What if I promise to never, ever take it out of the house?”
“If I get it for you, will you stop throwing things in the cart?”
 
I promised not to throw in any more cans of sardines or anything else we didn’t need.

The moment we got home, I ran into my room with the new, fabulous gun, threw the Bond album on my Mickey Mouse turntable and climbed on top of my bed. As “Goldfinger” began to play, my bed morphed into the base of the snow-covered mountain I needed to climb in order to save James. I put the gun through the whale belt holding up my pink corduroy pants and jumped from my bed to my toy chest across the room; I’d reached the top of the mountain. Instantly, the toy chest became the chair lift that connected to an adjacent mountain where he was being held in a stone jail.
I jumped down and the wooden cabinet upon which sat my turntable, turned into a giant boulder I hid behind so as not to be seen by the armed gunmen guarding his prison. When they turned their backs, I ran across my floor which was now a snow-covered field and dropped down next to my bureau which was a door; I opened the imaginary door with the skeleton key I always carried with me. There he stood; I motioned for him to follow. Just then, guards appeared and I fired – one, two, three shots. We narrowly made it to the car I had waiting at the base of the mountain.

I had saved him. Thank God my Mom had gotten the gun.

What character(s) set your imagination on fire?

______________________________________________________________________________
Identity is an issue close to my heart, something I am fascinated by, and some recent comments here got me thinking about it. We play so many roles; we are so many people to the scores of different people in our lives. When I started thinking about the roles I play or have played throughout the various stages of my life, specific songs would pop into my head. At first, I thought I might try to create a Top Five list of my favorite life roles. This was not an original idea but instead, a thought inspired by author Nick Hornby’s main character, Rob, from the book, High Fidelity; Hornby is a genius with lists. I simply couldn’t narrow it down; there are far too many great roles in my life that go hand in hand with amazing tunes. Every identity we wear is fodder for our artistic endeavors because each one teaches us something important about our lives; thus, the birth of the Beat Chronicles.  
______________________________________________________________________________

I was obsessed with Grease long before I understood the true meaning of the song, “Greased Lightning” and believed that women do not need to change for men. I wanted a boy to like me the way Danny Zuko liked Sandy, to smoke cigarettes like Rizzo (I couldn’t get my hands on any cigarettes so the pipe was my prop; it would be years before I would dive into a box of Parliments), to ride the ferris wheel during, “We Go Together” and dance like Cha Cha DiGregorio. Mostly, I wanted to sing like Sandy.

After I went to see the movie with my Mom and her friend, I begged her to buy the album. My Mickey Mouse record player was practically worn out from use. I had this fabulous flowered nightgown which is pictured here and, despite the fact that it looked nothing like her nightgown in the movie, I believed I looked just like Sandy when I wore it. I would sit on the edge of my toy chest with my legs tucked neatly underneath me and sing “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee” the same way Olivia Newton-John did in the film. On the floor lay my yellow blanket, my imaginary pool, and I would sing to it.

When the words, “Hold your head high” left my lips, I would look up at the stuffed monkeys that lined the shelf just above my bedroom door and sing my heart out.

Do you think Sandy completely changed for him or do you think she remained that “super nice, great to bring home to the parents” babe and just brought out the “black leotard wearing” temptress for like birthdays and drunken evenings?

Either way, there is something nice about remembering a time when underlying messages and sexual innuendos were lost on me; when all I cared about was the music.