Moving Music: "Blue Sky"

    

The Allman Brothers: (L to R) Jaimoe, Duane Allman, Greg Allman, 
Dicky Betts, Berry Oakley and Butch Trucks
(photo by Jim Marshall)

     There are a good number of songs that have affected me in profound ways throughout my life. In the next couple of months I'd like to feature some of them here. This won’t be a song analysis post and it definitely won’t be any of those “Why you should like this” type of posts either. I’ve always found them to be a bit obnoxious. Obviously, like many art forms, music is subjective. There can be many reasons why you love a song or why it speaks to you in a certain way. I want my focus to be on how these songs have transcended from something much more than a great pieces of music to something that goes deeper into my being. I won’t particularly dwell on great lyrics or fabulous musicianship of these songs, though certainly these things are some of the qualities that have endeared the song to me. It’s basically how, for whatever reasons, these songs have elicited a feeling in me that is much more than the sum of its parts. I’m also not going to try to convince you that you too should like any song I explore. I understand if you think the song is just okay or you don’t like the singer’s voice, or maybe it's too country or too disco or too whatever for your liking. I get it. It's a very personal experience. Maybe you will appreciate it or maybe you'll think about songs in your own life that have moved you in an incredible way. The first song I'd like to feature is “Blue Sky” by The Allman Brothers Band.

A Mere Coincidence?

    Possibly. Others might say probably. I guess there isn’t any kind of synchronicity at play here but it still fascinates me because I think to myself, what are the odds that this seemingly meaningless, silly thing occurred?
    Like everyone I’ve been watching a lot of TV. I have a lot of the streaming services and can pretty much watch most anything. One evening I came across the show Monk starring Tony Shaloub, which ran for 8 seasons. I remember when it came out back in 2002 but had never watched it. I like Mr. Shaloub so I figured I should give it a go. I’ve watched a lot of different series the past year. I call them filler, not in a negative way but just something easy to watch to fill in the time here and there or in between movies since they’re usually an hour or under. Some of these shows I had seen before and others were new to me. A few shows I’ve watched are: Twin Peaks, Community, Ozark, How To Get Away with Murder and The Twilight Zone(the original version. I do want to see Jordan Peele’s version but I don’t have CBS all access; you can’t have them all) And again like everyone, I tend to binge on these multiple episodic shows. You can watch just one(most likely not) or as many as you want and because of Covid you don’t have to feel bad that you are avoiding life by binging on several hours of TV because this is life right now. So watch ten episodes in a row guilt free. Unlike Netflix, which will throw up an entire season of their shows in one shot, channels like HBO, Showtime or AMC still follow the old way and release an episode a week. I tend to wait till shows on these channels have finished their seasons before beginning to watch them. I don’t want to wait a week between episodes. I can’t. I won’t. Let’s get back to Monk.

Ode to Baseball Cards

      In the past few weeks we lost two baseball greats: Lou Brock and Tom “Terrific” Seaver. One of the first things I thought about with their passing was my baseball card collection. When I was a kid in the late 70’s, I collected baseball cards and I remember seeing both the Lou Brock and Tom Seaver cards you see above. I’m sure all the names of baseball players of that era, however obscure, are somewhere in my brain. After all I was constantly flipping through all my cards and would see their names again and again. The first year I started collecting in a serious and passionate way was in 1976

     At this time it was mostly Topps cards that dominated the market, not just with baseball and the other major pro sports, but also with movies and TV. There was Mork and Mindy, Happy Days, Charlie's Angels and other collections from the biggest TV shows and movies of the day. You better believe there were a ton of Star Wars cards out there. My brother had some of those. But for me I think there was something more tangible and fun with collecting baseball cards. 1976 was also the year I went to my first major league baseball game at Shea Stadium to see the New York Mets, so it was thrilling to collect baseball cards and then see those players in person or watch them on TV. Each year the new baseball cards would come out right before baseball season started. It was exciting to see what the new design was and give it a thumbs up or down. I’m sure I disparaged the look of the 1978 baseball card, that year the team names were written in cursive. Yuck. But no matter how little I liked the look of the new baseball cards of any particular year, it would never discourage me from collecting them.