Stop, Hey What's That Sound?

My Dear Princess and Dear Fellows,

It was pishing this morning. Jasper didn't care. He gamboled around the garden, hopping from one spot to another like a fat bunny, looking for somewhere it wasn't WET. 

Good luck with that, little buddy.

He eventually realised that when it rains, it rains everywhere except inside and BOLTED in through the back door with a howl of despair. Then he sat next to me on the couch and cleaned his feet noisily, in a huff.

The weather sort of precluded any other sort of activity. So I hung out with the boys and Caro all day. Also I set up my new phone, which only involved resetting passwords and getting one-time passcodes texted to me (and sometimes not texted to me) for about two hours.

Fun times. 

And now we are watching a documentary called Laurel Canyon about the Californian music scene in the 1960's. Caro and me both LOVE oldies so this is right up our street. 

We come at this music from two different directions though. In Caro's case she was indoctrinated by her parents. They lived through Swinging London and so they had ALL these records and played them all the time. Caro told me Shetland Dad used to play the "Dollar Game" with her and Feefs when they were little. 

If they could name the song playing on "Classic Gold FM", they'd get a dollar. To this day, her knowledge of 40's, 50's and 60's music is encyclopedic. Thank you, Shetland Dad.

It was different for me and Tups. Our parents had the cut-off date of 1963 in their musical tastes. Anything after Cliff and The Everly Brothers was "weird" and about drugs. It was strange. Me and Tups rebelled by finding Jimi Hendrix and The Doors for ourselves. 

It was kind of a delight to find someone whose musical tastes overlap with mine so much. I remember right at the very start of me and Caro getting together, the pair of us dancing around the living room in Abbeyhill to "Sympathy for the Devil". I joined in the "oooh-oooh" part while Caro played the maracas on a salt-shaker.

In the documentary, Buffalo Springfield feature quite a lot as they were integral to the Laurel Canyon scene. Their most famous song is "For What It's Worth" of course and they were saying it is such a strong song because everyone can interpret it their own way. 

"It's about Muppets," Caro told me, back in 1999. I remember this well. It was one of the first things she told me about her musical tastes. She loves this song, but only because it featured on The Muppet Show and she fell in love with it right away. 

To this day, she sings it in a Muppet voice and mimes the woodland creatures, hiding from the hunter. I can't think of it any other way now.

It's sort of spoiled by documentaries like this, which will try to convince you that the song is really about Vietnam, but huh, what do they know? 

It's also kind of a bummer when you discover that a lot of our musical heroes were egocentric dicks. Joni Mitchell, Jim Morrison, David Crosby, John Philips, Neil Young...

Dick, dick, dick, dick, dick.

The only people we find we really like in episode one of the show is Peter Tork of The Monkees and Alice Cooper of Alice Cooper. Having said that , it turns out that Peter Tork was a total nudist, although I wouldn't hold it against him*.

But in the end it is all about the music. And the fact that it makes Caro sing and shake condiments. For what it's worth.

S.

* Fnar.