Sometimes when the words are gone, all you have is music. Sometimes all you need is music. Me being me and into music waaay more than average non musician, I used to communicate through mixtapes.
This mixtape I gave to my wife, Catherine, many years ago. It has helped me during this Lewy time. Many of the songs are of a spiritual nature which my wife, a pastor, would appreciate. (This is mostly music I have digitally, burned to CD from other CDs.)
A 2-for-1 as I race against time to review the 678 albums I have been collecting since childhood. No connection between Stewart out of California and the Silencers from Scotland. Only similarity, they both had minor hits, if not moderately successful careers.
Heck, the bass player for the Silencers is a cousin of Jim Kerr, frontman for Simple Minds. But Stewart, scores bigger with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks actually playing on his album. They are not relatives though.
Stewart’s album generated several hits including the cut, Gold. Album is solid LA soft or medium rock and roll. You can hear Buckingham whipping out guitar licks trying to make these songs come alive. Sometimes they do.
The Silencers haven’t aged as well. Their guitar and synth based 80s sound takes on too much sameness. They do have a killer version of the Peter Gunn Theme Song. But most of the time you are just waiting for them to be silenter.
I’m going to talk about these two movie titles but not the movies themselves.
Let’s start with ‘frozen.’ The other day I was getting out of bed and froze in kind of an awkward position, one foot on the ground, unable to put the other down.
My mind seemed to be a spinning car tire on ice, trying to gain traction but not going anywhere. My thoughts wandered. Seconds seemed like minutes. I heard my wife’s voice.
“Mike are you OK?,” she asked.
I snapped out of my unplanned reverie.
“Yes,” I said. “I was just frozen.”
Those who know something about Lewy body dementia understand it is cousin of Parkinson’s disease, in that the brain is being attacked by an overabundance of a protein. This malfunction can cause movement problems, including stopping while walking forward and becoming frozen.
This leads me to Awakenings, the based-on-a true-story with Robin Williams in the lead role. He plays a doctor treating people who have been frozen for years. The unusual symptoms were caused by an encephalitis outbreak starting in 1917.
Williams’ character discovered that hefty quantities of the medicine L-Dopa unfroze (thawed?) these patients, allowed them to move and talk again. According to the movie, they started right back up again, like toys getting a new battery.
Now I know very little science about the machinations of the brain and damage-causing proteins. I do have Lewy body dementia, and I find the Williams’ case to be one of the biggest tragic ironies of all time.
Williams in a 1990 movie finds a drug that cured (at least temporarily) the frozen nature of a group of people with brain damage. That ‘cure’ or successful treatment would likely have been the first drug prescribed to him. L-dopa, or levadopa (often combined with carbidopa for better results with the levadopa.
Despite memory loss, sleep problems, hallucinations, constipation, depression and anxiety, he was never diagnosed with LBD.
Williams died by suicide; the autopsy said he had a severe case of Lewy bodies and was plagued by hallucinations.
I too have had major hallucinations. I too have had movement disorder to the point I freeze or cannot write this column because my hands don’t work.
My movement disorder has led to feelings of frustration and despair.
I was hammered with these feelings until I found the right doctor and right mix of meds.
And with LBD, anxiety and depression double down with hallucinations. If only he had a doctor like the one Williams played.
I take a number of medicines but one that addresses my movement issues and does a fine job of it is carbadevadopa.
Did anybody give Robin Williams this? With no correct diagnosis and no medicine like he dispensed in the 1990 movie, Williams thought he going crazy. I don’t imagine how he felt. I know how he felt.
I know.
Mike Oliver is a retired journalist whose focus is bringing awareness to Lewy body dementia which affects 1.4 million in the United States. Website www.myvinyicountdown. com ……………………..
I look outside my front window many days and watch the Moms and Dads drive by in succession, just having picked up their young’ns at the day care in a church down the road.
As I watch, I become thoroughly convinced that this day care requires parents to have cars that are colors white, black or gray — big late model vehicles big like the Chevy Suburban or the Nissan Armada or the Ford Exhibition.
I don’t know this is a requirement for sure. But something has to explain the phenomenon.
Of the two dozen or more cars I saw, today, I’d say 95 percent were one of those colors. I didn’t see a red car, or a green car or a yellow car.
The only variation I could see were the few cars with shades of gray that almost looked blue or brown.
My wife, Catherine, had a succession of three red cars over a period of a couple decades. Said the red ones are easier to find in the parking lot.
Outside our house sits a Honda CRV. It is tan (maybe just a tinge brown). No matter the color, it is our favorite car ever. It was given to Catherine and me to help in our Lewy body dementia fight by our wonderful friends in Florida, Ivor and Mary Scott Singer.
For those wondering about my mention a few posts ago of the Eric Burdon and the Animals Greatest Hits album. I said I wasn’t reviewing it because I had just last week bought it at Renaissance Records on Birmingham’s Southside.
The reason I’m not reviewing it for the Countdown is because I’m not reviewing recent purchases (unless I have an executive order from myself). I also am not formally going to review the Brummies new album, ‘Automatic World,’ which I bought about a month ago at Seasick Records. Now in Nashville, the Brummies started in Birmingham, borrowing its name from British slang meaning resident of Birmingham.
But I do want to discuss the album, if I may, for a few minutes. I love it – but I don’t know why. If you had to label it, you would call it soft rock, along the lines of early Bee Gees (which I also love).
The production is fabulous like their excellent first album ‘Reach.’ All of the songs seem radio friendly – but in a different era like the 1970s and 1980s — I hear some Howard Jones influence in there and, perhaps 10cc. The hooks – and the album is loaded with them — sneak up on you. Definitely, an album that takes some time to show its many facets. The album I bought was a two-record set with opaque yellow vinyl.
It’s a breath of fresh air (supply) infused with a striking, sunshine soul. Perfect medicine for an infected world.
(NOTE: Album is named Automatic World’ — not ‘Automatic for the People, the excellent REM album.)
The Greatest Hits from the Soul of Texas (compilation 1984) 3.5/$
Chess Rockabillies (1984 compilation) 4.0/$$$
I’m going to do a three-for-one here as I wander back and forth from R’s and S’s to continue the, more or less, alphabetical countdown of my 678 records.
Rockabilly is the collision in the latter half of the 1950s of country and R&B. With a twang and a beat, it was hillbilly music with a touch of soul. The Stray Cats hit the scene in the 1980s introducing a new generation to rockabilly, retrofitted for the 1980s. Songs like Rock this Town and Stray Cat Blues managed to sound current even though the group retains authenticity.
The Cat’s version of rockabilly was quite a success with Brian Setzer’s blazing guitar leading the way. My other two albums I’m introducing to you contain real rockabilly from the time before it even had the ‘rockabilly’ tag.
The 1984 compilation Chess Rockabillies is a wonderful record. A compilation of the genre by artists you don’t know with the possible exception of Dale Hawkins who kills it with Suzy Q, a soul-based ‘billy number notably covered by Credence Clearwater Revival.
The third record is an odd sort of compilation album: ‘The Greatest Hits of the Soul of Texas’ has a smiling cheesecake photo of a woman — who looks like she comes frpm the HeeHaw TV show — on the cover, and features artists such as The Traits, Roy Head, and Sunny and the Sunliners. The album is one in a series (I think) from Scepter Records.
Now that I’ve done over 500 blog posts on a blog aimed at alerting people to the horrors of Lewy body dementia, I’d like to give the other side.
Seriously? I’m not trying to make light of it, but I am trying to do what momma always told me: ‘Look for the good in bad situations.’
So, here are 5 things I am thankful for about living with Lewy body dementia:
LBD has taught me:
Life is precious and fragile. Learning that death by disease would most likely take me in fewer years. I don’t care what religious persuasion or belief system one may hold, LBD will kill you — in a painstaking slow way. And that may be all there is, folks. There is no way you can keep your mind from exploring what the future holds. What’s good about that? It forces us to think about our existence, not last year, not last month or not sometime later. We may believe we are going to Heaven but we don’t know it, can’t prove it, and if it does exist, then there very well could be a Hell. That said, the disease has given me a stronger belief that God exists Thanks Lewy body dementia.
It has given me a reason to live. Unless someone has a friend or relative with the disease, most – even if they’ve heard of it before — have a very limited understanding of LBD. It needs a press agent and quick. So, while there are a growing number of outlets for providing information, I started blogging. It gave me something to do that had real meaning — even if to a relatively small amount of people. For that I say: Thanks Lewy body dementia.
Empathy. It’s like when you buy a new car. Suddenly, you see a multitude of cars just like yours whereas before you hardly noticed them. You’re not so unique anyway. For me that’s what’s happened to those living with dementia. Suddenly, I see them everywhere, shuffling here and about, blank look on face (masking) and perhaps one of the fists are clenched, and the fingers going tap, tap, tap against the palms. Not in fists of rage. It’s given me an empathy I didn’t have before I was hit with LBD. And that feeling spreads so the bonding of the people spreads exponentially. Thanks Lewy body dementia.
The brain is an amazing organ. When I was going through hallucinations I couldn’t believe the sophistication of the tricks my brain played on me. Sometimes it felt real-er than real. It gave me a real brain exercise trying to figure how it did that. Thanks Lewy body dementia.
They really are talking to someone. The homeless person you see addressing an invisible someone, gesticulating, emphasizing words. I now know what that’s like. The invisible man or woman, really do exist — in his mind. And it’s as real as you or me. (More praise for empathy). Thanks Lewy body dementia.
The post below on Joe South is my first one on this site, My Vinyl Countdown, since July 25, 2020. Wanna know where I’ve been? I’ll tell you where I’ve been: through the nine circles of hell and back. That’s where.
Lewy body dementia put on a show in my head for months with invisible “people,” intense psychological battles, and ever changing perceptions of reality: inanimate objects coming to life, conversations through telepathy, and fears/paranoia that I was being followed by cameras. I felt like I was in another universe, and maybe I was.
But I weathered it, often through ingenuity I didn’t even know I had. It was kind of like an R-rated version of Little Pilgrim’s Progress or the Land of Oz where Dorothy had the answer of how to escape all the time.
Of course, along with me figuring out this new world system, I must give the miracle of modern medicine some credit.
Stay tuned I’ll give you more detailed information about my journey from diagnosis to now, as the meds and I re-crank my battery. I am by no means ‘cured’ of this degenerative brain disease. But I’ve certainly latched on to a more logical reality.
So, I understand I have some records to review. I promised 678 and I will deliver; I need to do some accounting or counting. Though I have expanded my collection quite a bit — I’m sticking to my 678 originals (with a few exceptions. I’ve done about 430.
NP: Sky Pilot by Eric Burdon and the Animals. Gosh, this best-of Burdon and the Animals album is a surprise psychedelic rock-out. But this album I will not review as I bought it last week at Renaissance Records. I do have a couple of War records though, of which Burdon was a co-founder.
Now this is what I’m here for. Dusting off old music I grew up on – music probably unknown to most under 40.
Joe South, Georgia singer-songwriter is one of those somewhat forgotten artists whose songs you know but the name just can’t come to you. He’s kind of a southern Jim Croce or maybe a more serious Joe Stafford. Croce with “Operator,” “I’ve Got a Name’’ and ‘Bad Leroy Brown’ obviously sold a ton of records.
So did South. ‘Games People Play’ which had the line: ‘Oh the games people play now, every night and every day now, never meaning what they say Lord, Never saying what they mean.’
How about these songs by South: “Hush,’ (a huge hard-rock hit for Deep Purple); Down in the Boondocks (a giant hit for Billy Joe Royal}; the surprisingly well written nostalgia piece, “Don’t it Make You Want to Go Home.” ‘Delta Dawn,’ a smash for country star Lynne Anderson. And, the classic, “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,’ are others, but you can see there’s some meat and potatoes in his discography. (Vegetarians, ‘Hush.’} The greatest hits should be sufficient for all your Joe South needs. Joe South’s talent was apparent but his creative output froze up on him. He lived in Hawaii for years before coming back to Georgia where he died in 2012.
