A Gentleman’s C: More Previews from the Playlist Book

In September, I blogged “in case I don’t live to see the book on my playlist published, here are a few of the passages under B.” Given our linear times, I’ll preview a bit of C here (we’ll get to A later) …

Charlie Don’t Surf. I recommended this Clash classic to a colleague who’s a Vietnam vet, then wondered if that was ill-advised. Maybe “Straight to Hell” would have been worse.

Chemistry Class. Got on my high horse teaching my daughter how sometimes language is sharper when you create the expectation of a rhyme, then don’t make one. For example: “You’ve got a chemistry class I want a piece of your mind.” The same song shows good rhyming: “They chopped you up in butcher’s school/Threw you out of the academy of garbage/You’ll be a joker all your life/A student at the comedy college/People pleasing people pleasing people like you/You’ve been around so long but you still don’t know what to do.”

Coin-Operated Boy. I can’t hear Amanda Palmer without thinking of Alison Palmer, the babysitter in The Russians Are Coming.

Cold Cold Cold. Little Feat’s medley with Tripe Face Boogie brings me back to entertaining friends at sleepouts back when I was high and outgoing.

Come Together. I thought John Lennon was saying “Hold you in his objey” you can feel his disease. I didn’t know what “objey” was, but when my nephew Stefano (when he was still Steve) and I were selling lemonade around 1970, a guy on a motorcycle bought some, then spit a few black specs back in the cup. I always thought those were “objey.” Something like the “poison cottage” my brother Tim and I always thought festered under the sink near the green soap. I also conflated a memory that the biker crashed into a tree up Lothrop Street.

The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill. For me, it always preceded “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” I sang it to my kids: “He’s the all American bullet-headed Saxon mother’s son/All the children sing/Hey, Bungalow Bill/What did you kill, Bungalow Bill?”

Cotton Fields. Recovering in 2008 from a hijacking in the Gulf of ADEM, I got hooked on this Pogues song and confused it in my head with Cotton Fields from Creedence Cleawater Revival’s Willy and The Poor Boys. Meantime, had gone a bit cold on Creedence as their popularity resurged in the eighties, nineties, and people began to call them CCR … but then came back to them.

The Cowboy Mambo (Hey Lookit Me Now). Here David Byrne taught me about gardening and god. “Green grass grows around the backyard shithouse/And that is where the sweetest flowers bloom/We are flowers growin’ in God’s garden/And that is why he spreads the shit around.”

Crosseyed And Painless. Byrne’s observation that “Facts don’t do what I want them to/Facts just twist the truth around” helped inform an intro to a journal piece about higher ed trends & indicators. I wrote the piece to the tune of a rhyming rap song, though few readers would be able to tell. (I’m reminded of the depressing advice: “Puns and unclear allusions are to be avoided.” When I read that, I felt I was doomed. I’m all about unclear allusions.)