A Song in My Heart (It Should’ve Stayed There): A Little Traveling Music

Now that my daughter is attending UC Santa Cruz, I have decided that my trips up there are going to be my excuse to visit the great old book and record stores they have up there. Actually, do they even call them record stores anymore? Even CDs are passé these days. Passé or not, I’ve decided I should use the opportunity to buy some CDs of my favorite LPs that I haven’t been able to listen to in a good long while.

On my most recent trip earlier this month, I picked up American Pie by Don McLean, Graceland by Paul Simon, and Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band’s concert album, Nine Tonight. “American Pie” was Don McLean’s biggest hit and, at eight-and-a-half minutes, is one of the longest songs to reach number one. It’s always been one of my favorite songs and I knew all the words by heart by time I was in junior high (or most of them anyway; there was no Internet at the time to give me a definitive ruling on the “Landed foul on the grass” lyric). Understanding the various references to the music of decade or so following the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper (which actually has since become known as “The Day the Music Died”)—the King, the Jester, Lenin (or possibly Lennon) reading a book on Marx, Sergeants playing a marching tune, the Byrds eight miles high and their fallout shelter, Jack Flash sitting on a candlestick, and on and on—came bit by bit over the subsequent years.

"The angels guide my every tread/ My enemies are sick or dead/ But all the victories I've led/ Haven't brought you to my bed"

The album also includes “Vincent,” McLean’s other hit. Sometimes known as “Starry, Starry Night,” it was about Vincent van Gogh. I’d always thought it was a pretty song, but now find myself liking it even more since watching the Doctor Who episode, “Vincent and the Doctor.”

I cried too.

The rest of the album is a collection of 70 male vocalist soft rock ditties, some light (“Winterwood”), some dark (“The Grave”); good, but not great. Except for “Everybody Loves Me, Baby (What’s the matter with you?).” Now that song is made of sheer fun and deserves the title of “Greatest Love Song Sung by a Megalomaniac.” (Jonathan Coulton's “Skullcrusher Mountain” deserves recognition in this category too.)

I used to have Graceland on a cassette, which made it handy for the car. On CD, it is once again handy for the car. The song “Graceland” is such a great road trip song, especially through places like U.S. 101 through the hill-cradled farmlands south Monterey County or, as the song itself cites, the Mississippi Delta. The rhythm and the lyrics just nail the feeling of going somewhere for any number of reasons, but mostly for the sake of just going somewhere.

"These are the days of miracle and wonder"

Paul Simon is a songwriter with a particular knack for lyrics that stick with you like “How we look to a distant constellation that’s dying in a corner of the sky” or

“Along come a young girl, she's pretty as a prayerbook
Sweet as an apple on Christmas day
I said good gracious can this be my luck
If that's my prayerbook Lord let us pray”

Likewise, there are also memorable characters like “Fat Charlie the Archangel” and the “Girl in New York City who calls herself the Human Trampoline.” (And sometimes when I’m falling, flying, or tumbling in turmoil I say, “Whoa, so this is what she means.”)

Nine Tonight is a mashup of two 1980 Bob Seger concerts, one in Detroit and one in Boston. It’s a great album but it struck me as a little strange hearing him tell the audience how great it is to be back in Boston and then singing about northern Michigan summertime a few songs later. In any event, both audiences add a lot of excitement and energy to the record.

"Now sweet sixteen's turned [51] ... Come back baby, rock and roll never forgets!"

 I have for a long time maintained that the very best Bob Seger songs are either about rock and roll (namely, “Old Time Rock & Roll” and “Rock and Roll Never Forgets”) or are about a girl he might have loved but didn’t realize it until it was too late. The latter category includes “Night Moves,” “Roll Me Away,” and “Brave Strangers.” I also include “Hollywood Nights,” which was a bout a girl the guy didn’t realize he shouldn’t love until it was too late. These are songs that may make you think of a particular person from your past and put a smile on your face. It may be a wistful smile or it may be a relieved one, but you’ll smile nonetheless.

“So we walked out, hardly speaking, disappearing in the night
Saw each other a few times after, but we never really got it right
We weren’t lovers, just brave strangers…”

The last four songs on the Nine Tonight CD fall into one of these two categories: “Night Moves,” “Rock and Roll Never Forgets,” “Let It Rock” originally by Chuck Berry and turned up to eleven for the concert audience, and finally a concert version of “Brave Strangers” that I hadn’t even known existed before I read the back of the CD case.

Flying along Route 46 in the afternoon from Paso Robles to Lost Hills, singing as loudly and badly as I feel like; there are times when music is just perfect. I do love me a road trip.

Big Things Come in Small Blue Boxes: The Waters of Mars

I’ve just finished “The Complete Specials” in my morning elliptical machine viewing of the Doctor Who DVDs. These are the last David Tennant episodes before Matt Smith takes over in the title role. The doctor is traveling alone, so guilt-stricken after what happened to Donna Noble in “Journey’s End” that he even turns down a chance to take on Lady Christina de Souza played by Michelle Ryan as a companion at the end of “Planet of the Dead.”

She would have been a great companion.

 

(On a side note, I feel like the Bionic Woman reboot Ryan starred in never got a fair shake thanks to the writers’ strike that year. The show really could have found its feet if it only had a few more episodes.)

(On another side note, I like to imagine that somewhere deep inside Donna Noble’s subconscious, Doctor-Donna is working on the problem of restoring her memories without causing her brain to burst into flames. When she succeeds, she gets the Doctor to go with her to find 1960s companions Jamie and Zoe and restore their memories as well. It’s a cool idea, but as I’ve already noted, there ain’t no money in fanfic.)

(On one further side note, I’ve completely lost my place.)

Right. “The Waters of Mars.” It’s Doctor No. 10’s penultimate adventure, and it’s a dark one. The Doctor arrives on Mars at what turns out to be the first colony on Mars. It also turns out that the first colony on Mars is doomed and the Doctor can’t do anything to prevent the colony’s destruction without unraveling thousands of years of future history. Specifically, colony commander Captain Adelaide Brooke’s granddaughter will be the captain of humanity’s first interstellar mission to the stars, taking the inspiration from her grandmother and following her into space. As shown in a flashback, even a Dalek knows better than to screw with that level of future history and turns away from an opportunity to kill Brooke as a young girl.

 

So when the colonists start getting homicidally infected by something in their drinking water, the Doctor knows there is nothing he can do to save any of them. They will all die and the colony will self-destruct to prevent spread of the contagion. Their sacrifice saves the future.

Except, the Doctor has a change of hearts at the last minute. He’s already lost Donna and, damn it, he’s going to save the rest of these people. Why should Time Lord law apply to him when he’s the last Time Lord? He declares himself the Lord of Time and transports the last three survivors, including the commander, safely to Earth.

Brooke realizes the gravity of what the Doctor has done and what he’s becoming and, instead of thanking him, goes home and shoots herself. The other two survivors are left to tell the story of her heroism and, somehow, the future is preserved. Meanwhile, the Doctor realizes that he’s gone too far and even his time is running out. He climbs into the TARDIS and heads off to face the music in “The End of Time.” 

Her death is a fixed point in history. As they used to say at the Academy, "If it's fixed, don't break it."

 

I have some problems with this episode despite any number of outstanding dramatic performances by the entire cast. I can accept that the first colony on Mars is British because Doctor Who. I can accept the colonists packing guns instead of, say, bicycles. I can even accept building the entire colony on top of a nuclear warhead, just in case. (I figure the latter two recommendations came from some classified UNIT or Torchwood document that essentially said, “Hey, there may be Ice Warriors or Sutekh, so take some guns and bombs. They never actually help, but at least it won’t look like we weren’t paying attention.”)

This is one of those episodes that could have been solved by piling everyone into the TARDIS and getting out of there. Of course, that’s what he wound up doing; but why take them to Earth? Where history’s concerned, “presumed dead” is as good as “dead.” Especially when the supposed cause of death is a nuclear explosion on another planet. He could have taken them anywhere. He could have taken Captain Brooke to Proxima Centauri to meet her granddaughter. By that point, history’s already happened, so no harm, no foul.

C'mon, they named the ship Titanic. I have zero sympathy.

 

I get where the episode was going thematically. It goes all the way back to the first episode of the season, “Voyage of the Damned,” wherein the Doctor finds himself a passenger on a sabotaged luxury space liner. The adventure goes particularly badly for a Doctor Who episode and a lot of sympathetic characters die before it’s all over, including would-be companion Astrid Peth, played by singer Kylie Minogue. One of the survivors turns out to be a greedy self-centered businessman who not only lives but gets even richer because he’d just sold his shares in the doomed luxury liner’s company. Someone comments to the Doctor at the end that he was probably not the person that the Doctor (or the viewers) would have chosen to survive. But then again, the same observer adds after thinking for a moment, if you got to choose who lives and who dies that might make you sort of a monster. That’s what’s at the core of the Doctor’s epiphany at the end of “The Waters of Mars” when he says that he’s gone too far. I would have rather had a callback to that realization instead of Captain Brooke’s pointless suicide.

So, instead of following her grandmother into space, she follows her to a self-inflicted laser shot in a London flat? Dunno how they dodged that bullet, but then again, if there's one thing science fiction television teaches us, it's that lasers are much easier to dodge than bullets.

 

Big Things Come in Small Blue Boxes: Speaking of Things that Turned 50 this Month

So, Doctor Who premiered two days before I did, November 23, 1963. I’ve been a fan since junior high, which makes Tom Baker “my” Doctor. It aired in the late afternoon on weekdays on channel 52 in the days before cable. It was an Orange County station that didn’t have much power, so the reception was not great. Not long after that, channel 52 became the home of ON TV, which was subscription television service the broadcast movies and such on a scrambled signal. It was the late 70s; they were trying all kinds of things. Anyone remember Betamax? Of course not; people barely remember VHS these days.

Anyway, I DVRed (he says without a hint of irony after the last paragraph) all the specials and retrospectives leading up to last Saturday’s “Day of the Doctor,” which certainly lived up to expectations as far as I was concerned. What did turn out to be an unexpected treat was An Adventure in Time and Space, a dramatization (or, if you prefer, a dramatisation) of the creation of Doctor Who and William Hartnell’s tenure as the first Doctor. David Bradley’s portrayal of Hartnell was nothing short of brilliant and anyone who didn’t get at least a little choked up in the last five minutes you’ve obviously had the cyberman upgrade.