Lingering on Long Island with Billy Joel

Okay, so it’s not like he was there with me, just his music and a little park and boat ramp in Cold Spring Harbor that was named after him. And now I’ve had Billy Joel New York songs on my mind all weekend.

Here’s the story: Brian had a card tournament on Long Island on Saturday, our pup Eliot and I tagged along thinking we could do some sightseeing while he played. Even though I did some research beforehand, I gotta tell you, it’s not as easy as it used to be to just, as the Indigo Girls say, “Get out the map and lay your finger anywhere down,” and reviews online can be deceiving.

First of all, and this part I knew, most New York state parks do not allow dogs, but even Sunken Meadow State Park is confusing on the issue. Online it says that they are allowed on back trails only, not on the beach. Cool. I would have liked the shade, but when you pull up, the signs clearly say no dogs. Period. Only after getting home did I discover that one of the places I had thought of going to, Sagamore Hills, turned out to be one that allows dogs. Ah well, next time.

Cold Spring Harbor is a lovely little village, though I could never afford to live there. Eliot and I had a delicious breakfast at a shady sidewalk cafe (see above photo), and there’s a little beach there that allows dogs on leash. You just don’t want to park there without a permit. Because I am my father’s son, we parked for free by the woods just up the road where there were some very well tended and shady trails. Eliot did not like the water at the beach though, as he’s used to the river, and he kept barking at a piece of driftwood and wouldn’t get his feet wet.

When I saw it on the map, I was thinking, “Cold Spring Harbor, doesn’t Billy Joel have a song that mentions Cold Spring Harbor?” Well, turns out he does. It’s on his first studio album called, Cold Spring Harbor and was released in 1971. The album didn’t really pick up in popularity though until 1973 with the release of “Piano Man.”

For a Two-for-Tuesday feature, it seemed like “New York State of Mind” would be a no-brainer, but since we only drove through the city to get to Long Island, how about for our second song we play a tune that I played for Brian on the drive out? It’s one of my favorites and I think it’s highly underrated, only hitting number 57 on the top billboard 10. It’s called “Downeaster Alexa,” and it’s from his 11th studio album.

“Is that the name of a boat?” Brian asked. Yup, a downeaster is a style of fishing boat made for efficiency and safety at sea. And while this song is a fictional account of a fisherman trying to make a living, it’s inspired by the name of Billy Joel’s boat, which is named after his daughter Alexa.

First, a live recording of the Cold Spring Harbor tune, “Everybody Loves You Now.” And then from his 1989 album Stormfront, the song “Downeaster Alexa.” I think it’s important to note that three years after the release of Stormfront, Joel was cited for participating in a protest in support of local fishermen. I realize it’s a controversial issue regarding the preservation of striped bass, but it’s also about how hard it is for the working class to live in an area that has been overly gentrified.

Englishman in New York, Sting

We were in New York this weekend, and while we had fun, the travel was something else. Getting there was fine, but coming back was like a “series of unfortunate events.” There was a storm system we drove through on the way back that had us wishing we had found a hotel.

The rain was coming down hard on the highway and Brian discovered that out of mindless habit I had accidentally plugged in the directions to our home in central PA, rather than where we were intending to go in Northeastern PA to stay the night at his parents’ house. He was a sweetheart about it, but I was cursing myself a bit for the mistake.

Then suddenly the Apple map lady, whose directions we were so carefully following, popped up with an announcement about a “safer route.” Well, I had already negotiated myriad turns and lane changes including a battle with a NYC cabby over a narrow bridge entrance, so a safer route in the pouring down night rain made sense. Who knows, maybe there was an accident ahead she wanted us to avoid. We clicked yes.

The directions we were given seemed fine enough at first, taking us off the main route, fewer cars and fewer crazy drivers to dodge. But then we were told to take this right and that left until we were going over a small mountainous area through New Jersey woodlands and the Pequest Wildlife Management area, Small roads, one lane bridges, lots of deer crossing signs, foggy descents down curvy roads until eventually we found ourselves making up for our accidental southerly path by following the Delaware River northward on the east side and passing through (I’m not making this up) the tiny town of Buttzville.

I come from the woods of northeastern Pennsylvania, but this was not the terrain I wanted to be going though after driving all day, especially in a rain storm that had dropped branches and leaves into the middle of the road ahead of us. Overhanging green boughs waving wildly above us threatened to land on us any moment. At that point, I would have preferred to be navigating the streets of Brooklyn like I had been doing prior to this. Eventually, we reached route 80 and passed through the Delaware Water Gap to make it back into PA, and things were easier going.

Meanwhile this weekend, my buddy Mitch was facing his own New York crisis as his family’s flights were being cancelled because of this same storm system, and he had to make plans to pick them up at the Newark airport. Through messages, we joked that we’d wave to each other in passing. When they finally got off the tarmac, it was well after midnight, so they got a hotel and ended up spending a lovely day by seeing the Statue of Liberty via the Staten Island Ferry.

Needless to say, both of us are a bit tired at work this Monday, and while he has his Staten Island story, I’ll tell you more about my Long Island Saturday during tomorrow’s song of the day feature. For now, inexplicably and only tangentially related, I have Sting’s “Englishman in New York” running through my head. It was his 1988 single from his 1987 album Nothing Like the Sun, and the video features, of all people, the outspoken and controversial Quentin Crisp.

I’ve been to NYC enough times to feel somewhat at home there, but I am sure that those who live in the city see me as an alien among them, that is if they have time to notice visitors at all. However, I certainly felt like an alien to New Jersey on that wild wilderness detour. At home Brian and I joke about being adopted Brits because of friends we have in the UK and all the BBC programs we watch, so maybe that’s part of the connection to this song as well.

For whatever it’s worth, this is my Monday earworm and I now bestow it upon you. For all of us who have felt out of place, Sting’s “Englishman in New York.”

Summer in the City, Lovin’ Spoonful

In my preteen and early teen years I spent a lot of time in my room listening to records. Some of Mom’s old 33’s, then 45’s handed down to me from my brothers. That’s how I came to know the Lovin’ Spoonful’s song “Do You Believe in Magic?” But the version I first listened to was actually a later cover by Sean Cassidy. It would be years later before I would hear the original, which somehow felt more mature than the happy, smiley Sean Cassidy version.

Image by JLB1988 from Pixabay

I’m pretty sure the “Summer in the City” single on my record player was the original, though, and talk about gritty and mature. I don’t know how you get grit and depth into a song that seems to be just a simple teen tune about going out in town on a hot summer night, but there’s something about it, whether its the key changes, the tempo . . . I am sure Brian could give me an excellent musical analysis for how this song has impressed listeners and critics alike.

It was their only number one single, but released in 1966, it was their fifth song to make it into the top ten. The band’s songwriter John Sebastian reworked a song written by his 14-year-old brother, Mark and created some major-minor key contrast between the verses and chorus. I can’t find any information on whether Mark was pleased with the results of his big brother’s changes, but I suspect he didn’t mind being part of the creation of a number one hit.

I’m heading to the city with Brian this weekend and it will be hot. He’ll be playing in a gaming tournament while Eliot, our pup, and I dip our toes in at the beach on Long Island. Wish us luck!

The Mountain Goats, Three-for-Thursday

How does one explain the Mountain Goats to someone who has never heard the band? Well, first off, it’s not so much a band as one guy who just as frequently performs solo as he collaborates with other musicians. While band members change from time to time, John Darnielle remains the core member.

Photo by Adam Kissick/NPR

Second, the band’s style has evolved from home-grown music, sometimes recorded on a boom box to more polished studio work. Yet, their songs and music still have an essence of authenticity that is just probably not what you expect. There is a well practiced rawness, as contradictory as that may sound, and a lot of painfully honest lyrics that include the open sharing of feelings and thoughts in which the character in a song will “say the quiet part out loud.” While the effect may cause you to gasp, the gasp is just as likely to be followed by a sense of relief—like, I am so glad someone said it!

His lyrics can take me from cheers to tears. But results may vary for you. The important thing may be to let it speak to your gut without taking it too literally. Darnielle is sometimes an unreliable narrator and other times shockingly honest, but the voice, the man himself, never makes you feel like he is truly dangerous. To me, his work is art, even when it’s just play.

The best way to show you what the Mountain Goats are like is to just play you some music. It was hard to choose, but here are three that I like a great deal. Probably my favorite album is from 2005, Sunset Tree. In 2014, the Walking Dead TV show famously used the song “Up the Wolves” in its show. I never saw it. I just can’t do zombies.

Below, from that same album is a live version of “This Year” from that same album. I wasn’t going to play the original music video, but I have to. It’s just too iconic, too much a product of its time not to share. But trigger warning, it’s wild and weird with a little fake blood and completely non-real kidnapping.

The second song from the 2002 album Tallahassee is called “No Children” and is beloved by both me and my former wife—don’t worry, we actually are really good friends. No, seriously, we’re cool.

And finally, an unreleased song that John usually performs live. It was written around 2010 about a real person, and it’s called “You Were Cool.” In one concert sometime ago, he said since a lot of people ask, the person the song is about is doing really well. I hope that’s still true.

August Green, Featuring Brandy

If, like me, you’ve wondered how the name Juneteenth (not the holiday, more about that in a moment) came about, it’s what linguists call a portmanteau, a combination of two words into one, like the way fourteen and night became fortnight or the how the combination of breakfast and lunch is now commonly known as brunch. So, June nineteenth turned into Juneteenth.

As to what the holiday is about, I turn to retired teacher and activist, Ms. Opal Lee who has spent decades working to make Juneteenth a federally recognized holiday. I thought that this date was in honor of the emancipation of slaves, but that’s not quite right. The Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Lincoln in January of 1863. What happened on June 19th, 1865 may seem astonishing. Union troops arrived in Galveston more than two and a half years after the proclamation to announce and enforce the emancipation of slaves by “General Order No. 3.”

Historians seem ridiculously divided on whether Texas had not caught up with the the news or if they were deliberately not letting their slaves know. Considering part of the problem was the low number of union troops in Texas, and the fact that even then it wouldn’t take years for news to travel there, I’d solidly go with the latter. Texas was still in rebellion. I don’t know how we can deny that.

Part of the announcement was that the freed people were advised to stay and work as hired labor, but instead many fled to find other work and family that they had been separated from. Wouldn’t you have done the same?

The President of the United States signed Juneteenth into law as an officially recognized federal holiday in 2021, and as Ms. Opal Lee said, “now we can all finally celebrate. The whole country together.”

So, how does one pick a song for what amounts to a nation’s second Independence Day? I went over so many possibilities these last few days and settled on something new, well, newer. This marvelous collaboration is between the trio who call themselves August Greene and the vocalist who goes simply by the name Brandy. It’s somewhere between jazz, hip hop, and rhythm and blues. The original song is from 1991 by Sounds of Blackness. This 2018 version is just . . . well, you give it a listen and see what you think. It’s called “Optimistic.”

Hot or Cruel, What Do You Think?

It’s getting hot in the Eastern US today with highs in the 90’s this week. The other day I mentioned how my brother Jeff loves the heat and humidity, and always wears a flannel shirt when he comes up from his home in Florida to visit his family in Pennsylvania. I’m a bit the opposite. I don’t necessarily like cold and damp, but give me a brisk wind and I’m happy to put on a sweater.

I’m old enough to remember being confused the first time I heard someone refer to another person as “hot.” I thought they were referring to the person’s temperature, until the context and their tone of voice sunk in. Ah, so hot can mean that, huh? Sexy, handsome, gorgeous, but hot? Well, now you hear it all the time. And of course, now it can mean popular, like the hottest hits on Spotify or the hot new fashion trends.

Maybe it goes back to Billy Idol. Wait, bear with me a moment, this makes some sense to me. In his 1982 hit, “Hot in the City” he has these wonderful words to encourage you that you are more than you think you are:

A sometime someone you’re not
Don’t wait to see what you got
‘Cause you know that you’re

Hot in the city, hot in the city tonight

I don’t know, I haven’t looked up the etymology of the use of “hot” as sexy or cool, so feel free to enlighten me in the comments if you know more about this. For our purposes today, I’m willing to give Billy Idol credit.

But one year after Idol’s hot tune, came “Cruel Summer,” a stand alone single from Bananarama that took a very different view on the heat. No, not Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer.” That’s a whole other ball of melted wax for another day. No, the girl band from 1983 saw the heat and humidity like I do. I don’t know if they were longing for the shade of a forest and a mountain stream, but they definitely didn’t care for the heat:

Hot summer streets and the pavements are burning, I sit around
Trying to smile, but the air is so heavy and dry

Strange voices are saying (What did they say?)
Things I can’t understand
It’s too close for comfort, this heat has got right out of hand

Yeah, I like the positivity and upbeat sexiness of Billy Idol’s take on the topic, but I have to admit, I’m more of a Davey Downer about it like Bananarama. Which one are you when it comes to heat? Do you love it or do you hate it? Are you an Idol or a Banana?

For you movie buff’s, here’s a bit of trivia. Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” got a boost in popularity in the US after it appeared in the film Karate Kid and in 1988, Billy Idol’s “Hot in the City” featured in the Tom Hanks movie Big.

Let’s listen to both and try to stay cool. And as my friend Toni says, don’t forget to hydrate!

Leader of the Band

Happy Dad’s day to all the fathers out there. I’ll be calling my dad later today, as it sounds like he has a lot of visitors this afternoon.

Mom told me she was jealous when I told her at the age of 14 that Dad and I had gone for a ride in the country and he was singing. She said he didn’t sing for her in the car anymore. But on that drive on the Farandsville Road along the West Branch of the Susquehanna, I recall him belting out in his rich baritone songs like “I Go to the Garden Alone” and “The Old Rugged Cross.”

As far as I know, he never led a band, but metaphorically, this is one of two songs I always think of when I think about Dad. The other one is more recent and we played it here before on Jeff’s Song of the Day, “Most of All,” by Brandi Carlile.

But with just a bit of non literal poetic license, this is the song I could see myself singing for him. It was written for Dan Folgerberg’s father and was released in 1981 when it reached number one on the charts, just one year before Dan’s father passed away.

I’m lucky to still have a father who is still around. My best and warmest thoughts to you whatever your family situation. Whomever you are celebrating today, I hope you can do so with gratefulness.

Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly What?

Before Brokeback Mountain there was Willie Nelson. Or to be more accurate, there was a 1981 song written by a man named Ned Sublette, who had Willy’s voice and style in mind when he composed it. Sublette lived next to an urban cowboy bar called Boots and Saddles on Christopher Street in New York City and was obviously heavily influenced by that experience as well as what it was like growing up New Mexico and “what it felt like to feel different as a teenager, and the culture at that time.”

Ned’s song was performed by others over the years, but more than twenty years after the original, and one year after the Brokeback Mountain film, the song took off with Willie Nelson performing and releasing it on Valentine’s Day, 2006. I realize that the some of the language isn’t up to date, but it’s empathetic as well as funny, and I just adore it. It’s called “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other,” and just this year Orville Peck (pictured on the left above) collaborated with Willie Nelson to record a new version of the song, whose video you can watch here.

You might know, if you’ve met my brother Jeff, that he has more than once been told he looks like Willie Nelson. In fact, he cleverly got some young ladies back stage to see a band once because one of the roadies said, “No, these girls are fine, they’re with Willie here.”

What you might not know is that Jeff was one of my biggest supporters both growing up and later when I was finally figuring out some big things about myself. And if you haven’t yet put the pieces together, the theme this week in the middle of June has been about Pride. From Cher, to George Michael, to Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” and the cast of RENT, these have all been songs that I think fit Pride month in a way that anyone can understand.

Jeff helped me to take some pride in more than one area of my life. And for that I honor and thank both my brother Jeff and his alter ego, Mr. Willie Nelson.

Streets of Philadelphia, Bruce Springsteen

I come from Pennsylvania, like my brother Jeff, but Jeff has lived more of his life in Florida than he has here. He likes it there, doesn’t mind the heat and humidity. In fact, he thinks it’s too cold here and wears a flannel shirt when he visits PA, even in the summer. I lived in Indiana a few years and have travelled around a bit. Unlike Jeff, my least favorite places are the hot and humid ones. Give me a brisk breeze out of the northwest and I will be most happy.

Where I live in the Keystone State is kind of midway between the larger metropolises of Philly and Pittsburg, and much more sparse in population than the Northeastern areas of Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. But I have some connections to Philadelphia beyond just being within the same state boarders. I have loved and lost in Philadelphia, and the wonderful person I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life went to school there. I enjoy visiting and not just the historic areas.

I don’t know if the song owed its popularity to the 1993 Tom Hanks movie called Philadelphia, or to the smooth voice of the Boss, but it got so much air play and main stream popularity even at a time when the topic of the song and the movie was not necessarily as favorable in the wider “culture wars.” Have you ever really listened to the lyrics? It’s not just about a guy who is down and out in Philly.

I was bruised and battered
I couldn’t tell what I felt
I was unrecognizable to myself
Saw my reflection in a window
And didn’t know my own face
Oh brother are you gonna leave me wastin’ away
On the streets of Philadelphia?

I walked the avenue, ’til my legs felt like stone
I heard the voices of friends vanished and gone
At night I could hear the blood in my veins
Just as black and whispering as the rain
On the streets of Philadelphia

Ain’t no angel gonna greet me
It’s just you and I my friend
And my clothes don’t fit me no more
A thousand miles just to slip this skin

The night has fallen, I’m lyin’ awake
I can feel myself fading away
So receive me brother with your faithless kiss
Or will we leave each other alone like this
On the streets of Philadelphia?

Sure, a good work of art applies to more than just one thing and this can be interpreted more broadly. But given these lyrics and the topic of the movie, this song is about a gay man “wasting away” from AIDS and being rejected by society: “So receive me brother with your faithless kiss.” Maybe sometimes it’s just easier to let a good sounding song play in the background without thinking about it what its lyrics say I guess. In fact, the cynic in me believes that our habit of only half listening helped contribute to the songs popularity in the early 90’s more than a general love for gay men with HIV.

Sorry to get so heavy. While the global severity of AIDS is thought to have peaked around ’97, it’s still a world wide health concern and has never been limited to one sexuality. I just think it’s important to recognize the progress that has been made in education, research, and public understanding, but to also remember those we lost, like my friend Dennis, especially at a time when some chose to make a health issue a political and moral issue instead and refused to deal with or recognize the crisis until tens and tens of thousands of people died. Let’s not make that mistake again. Please.

Two-for-Tuesday, Jewel by Request

It’s Brian’s birthday today and last night he said that he couldn’t believe he was going to be xx years old for only a few more hours. I was stunned and had to stop to do the math for a moment— thought he was a year younger! Already everyone thinks he’s much younger than he is. Old friends see his photos and comment on how my sons have grown. That’s him, holding our youngest and floofiest family member, Eliot.

Since Brian didn’t specify which Jewel song would make him happiest today, I picked one from the 90’s and one from 2010. Her debut studio album, Pieces of You, wowed the world in 1995 and featured “You Were Meant for Me” as its second single. It’s the same album that featured “Foolish Games” and “Who Will Save your Soul.”

Her second album, Spirit, came out in 1998 and had one of my favorite songs, “Hands,” but since that one has been much parodied over the years, and sometimes delightfully so, I thought we’d skip ahead into a country album of hers that I really wasn’t that familiar with. It’s called Sweet and Wild, and so my own personal dedication to Brian is the video below called “Satisfied.”

If you see Brian, in person or on the socials today, wish the young man a happy birthday.