A Loneliness Infected; Searching for meaning in quarantine
What are you doing? My wife asked.
“Just thinking.”
Its the umpteenth day of working from home and I feel a loneliness to my bones. And I got other people in the house, the aforementioned Catherine, my wife, and my daughter, Hannah, and her husband, Tom.
Just thinking.
Humans are social animals. We love to connect with other people. My daughters in their teen years would run out the door. Where ya going I’d holler from a comfy chair in front of a sports game.
Just hanging out , bye daddy, they’d say.
Call me, I’d yell back.
I was happy knowing they were happy ‘just hanging out.’
My wife was a pastor at a church in San Francisco so weekends she was always working. But I was happy knowing I’d go play basketball with ‘the guys.’ Hangin’ with the guys. And get home just as the daughters were running out of the door.
I had a soft chair, cold beverage and a TV. I was content.
I have to admit I’m having difficulty now finding that content spot as I quarantine against the coronavirus. Things are different now. I’m older, we all are older. I’m at special risk because of my Lewy body dementia diagnosis.
Maybe it’s self evident or too obvious that a little fear has creeped into my psyche.
Since the virus, I’ve often wondered and even asked people,: ‘What about the people who live alone.?’ I think there are many people lonely in a way they’ve never been before.
It’s a loneliness infected.
It comes with the exposure of our overwhelming vulnerability as humans on this planet. We are brought to our knees by a bug that we can’t see. COVID-19, like all viruses, are not exactly living beings, according to scientists.
Keep checking myvinylcountdown.com for more countdown vinyl record reviews. I have Queen as the latest. Just before Queen ther was P.J. Proby, who has a story that is pretty rock and roll.
Here’s a couple of pertinent song from John Lennon.
ALBUMS: Queen II (1974); Sheer Heart Attack (1974; A Night at the Opera (1975); News of the World (1977).
MVC Ratings: Queen II 4.0/$$$; Sheer 4.0/$$$; Opera 4.5/$$$$; News, 3.5/$$$
I was an early Queen adopter. And that’s saying something because Queen was so sonic in your face, bombastic and so not Bohemian that many had strong feelings strong negative feelings about Queen.
The critics pretty much panned the group. In a Village Voice review pompastic critic Robert Christgau gave Queen II a five -word dismissal review. He wrote: Wimpoid royaloid heavoid android void. C
Oh my Goid.
Of course it must have been all downhill from there. Not quite.
They later became at their peak, one of the most popular bands of all time.
Sure Queen II was heavoid but I was 14-year-old and thought the songs on the black side and white side (good versus evil) were really cool. Taking from the short-lived Glitter/Glam scene and heavy metal, Queen had musical talent on hand. Freddie Mercury, the lead singer with an amazingly powerful and wide-ranging voice, was also primary songwriter.
I never have had the self-entitled first album, although I’m familiar with it (the song’Tie Your Mother Down.’ particularly. Queen seemed to have pivoted after the critical slams of Queen II and released Sheer Heart Attack. It was a group of songs that that all sounded different, no connectivity whatsoever. There was, however, ‘Lily of the Valley’ which sounded like it belonged on Queen II.
A friend in my neighborhood in Indiana, who had introduced me to the group, said ‘They sold out, with Sheer Heart Attack.’ I didn’t agree.
(Shouldn’t we have been listening to John Mellencamp or John Hiatt in Indiana? Well, I moved before those two artists came to my attention).
In retrospect, it seems odd that some adolescent boys from Indiana known for its corn and a car race would be listening to Glam-rock British rockers. But we were, and still do.
The universal-ness of it all. Uh oh heavoid again.
So the scattershot nature of Sheer Heart Attack worked, mainly because of the big hit single ‘Killer Queen.’ This success set up the album ‘A Night at the Opera, which had the mega-hit ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ a single like perhaps no other. There have been other ‘songs-within-a-song’ before — ‘Uncle Albert’ by Paul McCartney, ‘A Day in the Life’ by the Beatles and ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’ by Meatloaf come to mind.
But none of those, although quite popular, I think equals the universal appeal of Bohemian Rhapsody with its outrageous blending of opera, rock and roll and romantic balladry.
About this time 1977-78, I was getting ready to graduate from high school and moving on in the state of Georgia. I inherited ‘News of the World’ from my wife, but it wasn’t the same Queen, and it wasn’t the same me.
I was ready to movoid down the road picking up other great music along the way. Like Mellencamp and Hiatt.
As some of my columns go I didn’t expect to write a column when I was just fiddling around on my computer. And thinking.
So I wrote up a little ditty about thinking. (Other stuff coming: a review on my Queen records and something about a Mixtape. And don’t forget my recent P.J {Proby review, a character indeed.)
Keep thinking folks!
Do our brains have an infinite number of thoughts?
When you are forming a thought you could go in a million directions. Or, maybe an infinite number of directions.
I’m thinking right now of the beach. I’m thinking of the emerald blue water and white sugar sand, I’m thinking of lotion, and sunburn. I’m thinking about the coronavirus. I’m thinking of a story I read about two cats in different parts of New York who got the coronavirus.
“I wonder if dolphins get the disease,” I think. Stop!
Stop these thoughts, I’ve got to finish this column.
So think about it: Do we have an infinite number of thoughts?
No, you say?
When you die, your brain dies so that would end the thoughts, you aver. Therefore, the number of thoughts a person has is finite.
But wait a minute, what if we are talking about everybody’s brain, not just a brain. Or, let’s suppose we are immortal and the universe is infinite. Seems like we would have, or be capable of having, an endless number of thoughts?
Google receives 63,000 searches per second.
Of those searches, 15 percent have never been searched on Google, according to the SEOtribunal.com, which I found using Google. Never? Never!
That’s an astounding number of new queries if you think about it. That’s 229 million per hour and 15 percent would mean that 34 million Google searches each hour are searches that have never been made before.
Like, I just Googled: “Do dolphins get the coronavirus?” The answer is yes so it probably has been searched. OK, new search: “Given that dolphins do get the disease how far is a safe distance from an infected dolphin firing off snot through its blowhole? Well, 100 yards is the immediate answer, I think Google has had that one too. (So, you can see it’s hard to come up with something new to search.)
Moving on, I believe there may be an infinite number of thoughts.
I would like to see if that 15 percent of searches number holds steady over the years.
I’m dipping my toe, here, into the ‘infinite monkeys theorem.’ You know the one: If you give an infinite number of monkeys a typewriter and teach them to mash keys at random, the monkeys would eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare (or maybe Edgar Rice Burroughs). It’s true, in theory.
So I started wandering down this path of thought, when I was reminded of a measurement I do know.
And that is: The human brain has 100 billion brain cells.
I have Lewy body dementia and it kills brain cells.
But think about our mindpower. There are 7.5 billion people on Earth with (maybe) an infinite number of thoughts.
There are thoughts leading-to-questions-leading-to-cures for my condition, for Parkinson’s, for Alzheimer’s for cancer, and, yes, COVID-19.
So think people. Think.
And use Google when necessary.
Mike Oliver is an opinion columnist who writes about living with Lewy body dementia and other topical issues. Read his blog at www.myvinylcountdown.com.
ALBUMS: Three Week Hero-PJP (1969); Enigma (1966): You Can’t Come Home Again (45 rpm) (1968): Somewhere (1967): What’s Wrong With My World (1968): Focus Con Proby (1977)
MVC Rating: Hero 4.0/$$$; Enigma 4.0/$$$; Home (45) 3.5/$$; Somewhere 3.5/$$; What’s Wrong with My World 2.5/$$; Focus Con Proby. (pending review)
I have written about Proby earlier when I named one of his albums one of the seven most underrated albums in My VInyl Countdown collection.
Proby’s story is certainly a wild one: he got kicked out of England; Van Morrison wrote a song about him; his sister dated Elvis; he played Elvis in a stage production; sang mostly rock and roll and ballads but at one point in the 1970s was lead singer for Focus the heavy prog band from the Netherlands in ‘Focus Con Proby.’ Focus is a group best known for their heavy metal yodeling song called Hocus Pocus.
First, a quick update on My Vinyl Countdown.com. That’s my website where I state my mission by vowing to listen to, write about and list (in alphabetical order) all of the records I have collected since, oh about age 12.
I’m 60 now. (I took about a two-decade detour into digital).
I am doing this to raise awareness of Lewy body dementia, which I have.
There is no cure for this disease, the second-leading form of degenerative dementia after Alzheimer’s. So yes, I am forgetful and I have tremors now and then. But thanks to modern science and miracles of their cost prohibitive I’m doing fine. My bank account may not be doing fine, but I am.
So anyway, I started with 678 records and have reviewed 438. Now I have about 240 records to go. (Give or take).
Thanks to everyone with the notes and kind words throughout this. It keeps me hanging on. (Got a Vanilla Fudge album to do when I get to the V’s).
Proby is one of those artists that I really didn’t know during my formative vinyl years. He’s one of several on the countdown that I have purchased more recently (past 3 years) as I started thumbing through bargain bins and thrift shops.
Coming home after a thrift store find I put on his Enigma record and immediately noticed the voice. It was an entity all to itself, Vegas, swamp rock, Elvis, Otis, Tom Jones — that voice channeled just about everything.
He was not moving the needle much in the U.S. but the UK seemed to love him. He was like Bizarro World Elvis: or Tom Jones playing Mick Jagger in a movie about the Stones; or Johnny Cash if he had grown up in Ireland during the 1950s and 60s and was heavily influenced by Van Morrison.
(These are fun, I could go on but I’ll restrain myself.)
The ‘accident’ sparked so much audience reaction that it happened again ……..and again. I couldn’t find any stories that detailed how many times it happened. But an oversight office on moral turpitude basically had Proby thrown out of the country.
PJ Proby’s albums were often a hodgepodge of styles looking for a theme. Some real gems however found within.
About the music. I would recommend Enigma which has his single ‘Niki Hoeky’ a Deep South novelty tune in the vein of Tony Joe White’s ‘Polk Salad Annie.’ Or about anything Jim Stafford would do.
Proby’s vocals jump comfortably from falsetto to hard rock/soul back down again.
The man knew he had a voice and that was possibly his downfall.
On stage he knew he could wow anyone when he opened his mouth to sing. But his ability to sing any type of song also meant that he recorded any type of songs — as if he was going for the shotgun affect and seeing which style will stick
The problem, which comes clear in the very-good-but-disjointed ‘Three Week Hero., ‘ is that he thinks it’s all too funny, like a comedian who has no sense of when to quit repeating the punch line. His exaggerated bumpkin accent on the opening title song on Hero has no reasoning behind it, context.
It’s bizarre as if he was brushing up to be on TV’s Hee Haw.
In another really good song he sounds like Johnny Cash — only better!
Then he airs out a completely gut wrenching Otis Redding like vocal on a song that made me readjust the listening device. He covered ” It’s so hard to be a N-word.’ No, I’m not going to write it).
It’s a song written by Georgia civil rights activist and African American Mable Hillery. I was brought up that white people never use the N-word so I questioned the appropriateness of a white man singing. Here’s Mable’s version.
And here is Proby’s version with the backing of a group of four men called the New Yardbirds.
Yes, the New Yardbirds were John Bonham, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. It is believed to be the first time the future Led Zeppelin members recorded together.
NOTE: This song is part of a 3-song medley that also includes ‘George Wallace came Rolling in this Morning.’
Off the same album is this one which sounds like it could have been a single.
This has hardly been a ‘Daily’ journal. Sorry about that.
The coronavirus has been a big distraction. Too light a word, distraction. It’s been a scary life-changing event for most. If you’ve been following this blog, you’d think that all I’ve been doing since April Fool’s Day is listening to piano music.
Holy Titanic, that’s not the case!
To catch you up on what I’ve been doing these past few weeks, I’ll start with the point where I realized this was a huge deal.
It was Friday, March 13, and after an exchange of emails with Dr. Michael Saag that started the previous day, I received and read an Op-ed piece Saag sent me and it really opened my eyes. In clear straight ahead prose Saag laid out the pending crisis from transmission to infection to possible runaway contagion and worldwide shut-down. Saag’s piece was a hard-hitting , fact-filled, Paul Revere call- out.
I felt Saag’s sense of urgency now . The AL.com headline published Friday evening:
On Saturday I talked to Saag again about some of the emails he had received from doctors he knew on the front lines in Italy. The emails painted a vivid and tragic scene: overrun emergency departments, bed shortages, medical staff weeping as they helplessly watched patients die. That story published Sunday, I believe.
Many of these stories were getting 10s and even hundreds of thousands of page views. Saag’s Friday the 13th Op-ed has had half a million page views to date. Millions were reading AL.com stories and our hard-working staff of several dozen have written and are writing hundreds of stories.
I have been in this business for 40 years at three major news organizations from Florida to California and have been involved in stories that have had major impacts. But in terms of public service and changing lives, the alarm bells — once we started ringing them — probably helped slow this thing down by educating the public. And while I’m viewing this through the lens of AL.com, I think it is true of the news media in general. It is a great example of where the value of journalism shines.
The reason: The coronavirus has hit our economy with a wallop not seen a long long time. We make much of our money from advertising and businesses are slashing those advertising dollars. And of course, some business will not survive.
What do we do? Keep on keeping on. In the meantime if you are so inclined, we announced a new way for readers to help:voluntary subscriptions. We hope enough readers will chip in $10 per month to help us do our job keeping the public informed.
I’ll leave you with a song I have adopted as my own personal coronavirus song by one of my favorites:
As I mentioned in my Countdown Post 247 and 248 I have come to really enjoy certain jazz. Late 50s, early 60s cool jazz and bop. i also like jazzy Brazilian music and some modern jazz.
Miles Davis, Charley Parker, “Big” Bill Patton, Stanley Turrentine. Chet Baker, etc. are all folks I’ve listened to more on this journey than ever before.
Here’s my list of best jazz piano players. I may be out of my league judging fine jazz but here I go anyway.
Erroll Garner. I had not heard of him until I found for a $2 bill a 10″ 33\ 1/3 record by him. Soon as I heard record I knew it was someone special. He was 5-feet -2-inches tall and never learned to read music — which at first kept him out of some good music schools. They relented and he came one of the best pianists of all time in the Jazz real.
Bud Powell his music is precise and yet it still swings like it has that boppity bop.
Art Tatum. I’ve heard him on several things; would like to hear more.
Thelonious Monk. I recognize his great skills. I haven’t listened that much to really ‘know’ Monk. I have a couple of 78s with Monk, Bud Powell and Charley Parker.
Keith Jarrett. Bought a box set of his music, mostly solo. I’d heard his name before, but the man can seriously play
6) Duke Ellington — The master leader could also play.
7) McCoy Tyner Everything I’ve heard has been good but haven’t heard much.
8) Keith Emerson. This is a little controversial because he didn’t play jazz per se but he played classical in a rock setting thus I think he was often ‘Jazzing up the classical bits). He as an amazing pianist. He performed Scott Joplin music and for one album. (Or half).
9/10. Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea. I recognize their talent but I was never a big jazz fusion fan beyond some home cookin’ bands, Sea Level and Dixie Dregs.
ALBUMS: The Amazing Bud Powell (1967 RE 1986); Oscar Peterson Solos (1950)
MVC Rating: Bud 5.0/$$$$$; Oscar, 4.5/$$$$
The longer I’ve been doing my countdown, the more I’ve come to appreciate jazz.
This Amazing Bud Powell record I’ve had since my 20s but didn’t play it much. It’s a 1986 re-issue of a 1967 album and now a regular on my turntable.
Oscar Peterson, a three record album of the great pianist’s solos, also gets playing time. Although as a 78 it needs extra work to go turn Over that thick piece of shellac over. One side, one track. It keeps you moving.
Although I like a variety of jazz, I’m especially impressed by the pianists.
See my post above this one to check my Top 10 piano players.
I have several musical people in my family but I have no training and no rights to be a judge. except for a seemingly passionate love of music. Here’s some Bud and Oscar.
Mike Oliver is an opinion columnist who written much about his own fatal illness, Lewy body dementia.
