DAY 11 - 30 SONGS IN 30 DAYS

 Day 11: A song you never get tired of

"Gimme Shelter" was written by the Rolling Stones' lead vocalist Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards, the band's primary songwriting team. Richards began working on the song's signature opening riff in London while Jagger was away filming Performance with Richards' then-girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg. In his autobiography Life, Richards revealed that the tension of the song was inspired by his jealousy at seeing the relationship between Pallenberg and Jagger, and his suspicions of an affair between them.

As released, the song begins with Richards performing a guitar intro, soon joined by Jagger's lead vocal. Of Let It Bleed's bleak world view, Jagger said in a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone magazine:

Well, it's a very rough, very violent era. The Vietnam War. Violence on the screens, pillage and burning. And Vietnam was not war as we knew it in the conventional sense. The thing about Vietnam was that it wasn't like World War II, and it wasn't like Korea, and it wasn't like the Gulf War. It was a real nasty war, and people didn't like it. People objected, and people didn't want to fight it ... That's a kind of end-of-the-world song, really. It's apocalypse; the whole record's like that.

Similarly, on NPR in 2012:

It was a very moody piece about the world closing in on you a bit ... When it was recorded, early '69 or something, it was a time of war and tension, so that's reflected in this tune. It's still wheeled out when big storms happen, as they did the other week [during Hurricane Sandy]. It's been used a lot to evoke natural disaster.

The song's inspiration was not initially Vietnam or social unrest, however, but Richards seeing people scurrying for shelter from a sudden rain storm. According to him:

I had been sitting by the window of my friend Robert Fraser's apartment on Mount Street in London with an acoustic guitar when suddenly the sky went completely black and an incredible monsoon came down. It was just people running about looking for shelter – that was the germ of the idea. We went further into it until it became, you know, rape and murder are 'just a shot away'.

The recording features guest vocals by Merry Clayton, recorded at a last-minute late-night recording session in Los Angeles during the mixing phase, arranged by her friend and record producer Jack Nitzsche. After the first verse is sung by Jagger, Clayton enters and they share the next three verses. A harmonica solo by Jagger and guitar solo by Richards follow. Then, with great energy, Clayton repeatedly sings "Rape, murder! It's just a shot away! It's just a shot away!", almost screaming the final stanza. She and Jagger then repeat the line "It's just a shot away" and finish with repeats of "It's just a kiss away". When speaking of her inclusion in the recording, Jagger stated in the 2003 book According to the Rolling Stones that the Rolling Stones' producer Jimmy Miller thought of having a female singer on the track and told fellow producer Nitzsche to contact one: "The use of the female voice was the producer's idea. It would be one of those moments along the lines of 'I hear a girl on this track – get one on the phone.'" Summoned from bed around midnight by Nitzsche, Clayton – about four months pregnant – made her recording with just a few takes and then returned home to bed. It remains the most prominent contribution to a Rolling Stones track by a female vocalist.

At about 2:59 into the song, Clayton's voice cracks under the strain; once during the second refrain on the word "shot", then on the word "murder" during the third refrain, after which Jagger is faintly heard exclaiming "Woo!" in response to Clayton's powerful delivery. Upon returning home, Clayton suffered a miscarriage, attributed by some sources to her exertions during the recording.

Merry Clayton's name was erroneously written on the original release, appearing as "Mary". Her name is also listed as "Mary" on the 2002 Let It Bleed remastered CD.

The song was recorded in London at Olympic Studios in February and March 1969; the vocals were recorded in Los Angeles at Sunset Sound Recorders and Elektra Studios in October and November that same year. Nicky Hopkins played piano, Jimmy Miller played percussion, Charlie Watts played drums, Bill Wyman played bass, Jagger played harmonica and sang backup vocals with Richards and Clayton. Guitarist Brian Jones was present during the early sessions but did not contribute, Richards being credited with both rhythm and lead guitars on the album sleeve. For the recording, Richards used an Australian-made Maton SE777, a large single-cutaway hollowbody guitar, which he had previously used on "Midnight Rambler". The guitar barely survived the recording before literally falling apart. "[O]n the very last note of 'Gimmie Shelter,'" Richards told Guitar World in 2002, "the whole neck fell off. You can hear it on the original take."

 

*(borrowed from Wikipedia)

THE BRICK WALL

Sometime after my divorce in 1998, I tried online dating with no real success. I likened it to repeatedly beating my head against a brick wall. So why am I even comtemplating doing it again? That's a very good question! I guess the best answer to that is that I'm either a glutton for punishment or that I have some eternal optimism buried deep within me. Since I decided to throw myself into the meat market again, I decided to share a few of my online dating stories from back when I did this the first time. 

Actually, I responded to this gentlemen’s ad online. The words he had written tugged at my heart and I felt almost duty bound to respond. After e-mailing and talking on the phone for several weeks, one Saturday evening about 6:30 p.m. he called me and asked me out to dinner. I explained I had been cleaning house all day, hadn’t even had a shower yet and was worn out. He said it didn’t matter and to just throw on a pair of jeans and we’d have casual dinner. Although it was on the spur of the moment, I love spontaneity, so I accepted with the stipulation he had to give me at least an hour to get ready. His drive to pick me up would be at least that long, so he said that wouldn’t be a problem.

As he drove, he called me on his cell phone a few times with the last time being about 10 minutes from my house. We talked until he arrived at my place. During this last conversation he told me he was allergic to strawberries and had inadvertently consumed some in a drink the day before and had broken out in a rash. This was not a problem and I asked him out of concern about the allergy and how he treated the rash. He also, at this point mentioned that his office staff referred to him as looking like a retired football player. That certainly wasn’t a problem. That just meant he was a rugged man. Well, let me tell you that when he got out of his car I almost fell over. If it had been daylight, he would have blocked out the sun!

When Jimmy Johnson was the coach for the Dallas Cowboys, he had a thing for BIG men on his offensive line.....somewhere in the neighborhood of 350lbs each. This guy made them look tiny!!!!! Okay, I’m not into looks and knew I could handle sitting through dinner with this man so his size was unimportant, but when we went inside the restaurant and I saw his allergic reaction, I lost my appetite. I’m no doctor, but whatever was all over his skin was more than one day old. It was scaly patches covering all visible skin with some of the patches having scabs. Not to sound gross, but some patches had scabs that were open and looked like they were oozing. Now, being the person I am...I could have probably even handled that, but as he sat through dinner telling me what I should and shouldn’t do with my poor dismal life and nothing I said was right in his eyes, he suddenly transformed from a very sweet, compassionate person I had gotten to know on the phone to an overbearing egotistical tyrant.

Everything I had done, he had done better. I got to the point where I just wanted to get through dinner and go home, but he had other ideas. He prolonged the agony by insisting on dessert which included showing me a portfolio of pictures of his ex-wife he still had in his wallet. He took extreme pride in pointing out how good she looks in a bikini. I sat in amazement wondering how much more I could tolerate when he started telling me he couldn’t stay out late because he had to fly out to DC early that next morning to testify before the Congress or Senate on some subject. At that point I was so tone deaf, I really couldn’t do anything more than try to imagine this HUGE OOZING male sitting in front of them speaking about anything. I smiled and told him I would make sure I turned the TV on in the morning so I could watch him testify......needless to say, he never appeared on TV and I never got asked out for a second date. As broken hearted as I was, I managed to pull myself together and struggle onward to be captivated by the next perfect man.

DAY 10 - 30 SONGS IN 30 DAYS

 Day 10: A song that makes you sad

Yusuf Islam (born Steven Demetre Georgiou; 21 July 1948), commonly known by his stage names Cat Stevens, Yusuf, and Yusuf / Cat Stevens, is a British singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. His musical style consists of folk, pop, rock, and, later in his career, Islamic music. He returned to making secular music in 2006. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.

His 1967 debut album and its title song "Matthew and Son" both reached top ten in the UK charts. Stevens' albums Tea for the Tillerman (1970) and Teaser and the Firecat (1971) were certified triple platinum in the US. His 1972 album Catch Bull at Four went to No.1 on the Billboard 200 and spent weeks at the top of several other major charts. He earned ASCAP songwriting awards in 2005 and 2006 for "The First Cut Is the Deepest", which has been a hit for four artists. His other hit songs include "Father and Son", "Wild World", "Moonshadow", "Peace Train", and "Morning Has Broken".

Stevens converted to Islam in December 1977, and adopted the name Yusuf Islam the following year. In 1979, he auctioned all of his guitars for charity, and left his musical career to devote himself to educational and philanthropic causes in the Muslim community. He has since bought back at least one of these guitars as a result of the efforts of his son Yoriyos. He was embroiled in a long-running controversy regarding comments he made in 1989, about the death fatwa placed on author Salman Rushdie in response to the publication of Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses. His current stance is that he never supported the fatwa: "I was cleverly framed by certain questions. I never supported the fatwa." He has received two honorary doctorates and awards for promoting peace as well as other humanitarian awards.

In 2006, he returned to pop music by releasing his first new studio album of new pop songs in 28 years, entitled An Other Cup. With that release and subsequent ones, he dropped the surname "Islam" from the album cover art – using the stage name Yusuf as a mononym. In 2009, he released the album Roadsinger and, in 2014, he released the album Tell 'Em I'm Gone and began his first US tour since 1978. His second North American tour since his resurgence, featuring 12 shows in intimate venues, ran from 12 September to 7 October 2016. In 2017, he released the album The Laughing Apple, now using the stage name Yusuf / Cat Stevens, using the Cat Stevens name for the first time in 39 years. In September 2020, he released Tea for the Tillerman 2, a reimagining of his classic album Tea for the Tillerman to celebrate its 50th anniversary.

 * (borrowed from Wikipedia)

DAY 9 - 30 SONGS IN 30 DAYS

 Day 9: A song that makes you happy

*It has become a tradition for many classic rock and adult album alternative radio stations to play the song each Thanksgiving. Despite its use of the slur "faggots", radio stations generally present the song as originally recorded, and the Federal Communications Commission has never punished a station for playing it. When performing the song in later years, Guthrie began to change the line to something less offensive and often topical: during the 1990s and 2000s, the song alluded to the Seinfeld episode "The Outing" by saying "They'll think you're gay—not that there's anything wrong with that," and in 2015, Guthrie used the line "They'll think they're trying to get married in some parts of Kentucky", a nod to the controversy of the time surrounding county clerk Kim Davis.

By the late 1970s, Guthrie had removed the song from his regular concert repertoire. In 1984, Guthrie, who was supporting George McGovern's ultimately unsuccessful comeback bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, revived "Alice's Restaurant" to protest the Reagan Administration's reactivation of the Selective Service System registrations. That version has not been released on a commercial recording; at least one bootleg of it from one of Guthrie's performances exists. It was this tour, which occurred near the 20th anniversary of the song (and continued as a general tour after McGovern dropped out of the race), that prompted Guthrie to return the song to his playlist every ten years, usually coinciding with the anniversary of either the song or the incident. The 30th anniversary version of the song includes a follow-up recounting how he learned that Richard Nixon had owned a copy of the song, and he jokingly suggested that this explained the famous 18½-minute gap in the Watergate tapes.

Guthrie rerecorded his entire debut album for his 1997 CD Alice's Restaurant: The Massacree Revisited, on the Rising Son label, which includes this expanded version. The 40th anniversary edition, performed at and released as a recording by the Kerrville Folk Festival, made note of some parallels between the 1960s and the Iraq War and George W. Bush administration. Guthrie revived the song for the 50th anniversary edition in 2015, which he expected would be the last time he would do so. In 2018, Guthrie began the "Alice's Restaurant: Back by Popular Demand" Tour, reuniting with members of his 1970s backing band Shenandoah. The tour, which features Guthrie's daughter Sarah Lee Guthrie as the opening act, was scheduled to wrap up in 2020. To justify bringing the song back out of its usual ten-year sequence, he stated that he was doing so to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the film version of the song. The tour ended in 2019 and was later confirmed to have been Guthrie's last; he suffered a career-ending stroke in November of that year and announced his retirement in October 2020.

* (borrowed from Wikipedia)

THE MEAT MARKET

Listen up! I have not been on a date since 2005! OMG! I really can't believe I'm even considering doing this but here I go...After long and careful deliberation, I've decided to give dating another try. I'll probably throw in the towel and run for cover and regret doing this, but for now, I've made up my mind and I'm going to at least give it a try. How bad can it be, right? Oh please, don't answer that because I already know the answer. 

I remember the last time I did this and it was a long time ago. Look after you reach a certain point in your life, your dating prospects dwindle and the likelihood of meeting that diamond in rough is a long shot. I'm going into this with my eyes wide open because I know I'm damaged goods so like me I'm choosing from a bunch of damaged goods. I'm just hoping to find someone I can mesh well with and who doesn't try to either tell me I'm doing everything wrong in my life or that doesn't immediately sweep me off my feet only to disappoint me five minutes later by being a total loser. 

Semi-normal would be nice! Not on a bunch of psychiatric meds ...sorry that was my ex-husband and thanks but no thanks! I'm tired to being a caregiver! I want someone I can just enjoy life with and feel like I can finally exhale. Tall...intelligent with a great sense of humor and a sense of adventure. Definitely has to be open-minded. Looks aren't really that important to me but sure, it'd be nice to have someone that wasn't fugly. I'm not going to lie. We're all visual creatures and of course, we like to enjoy what we look at. I'm not even going to worry about the physical stuff because I figure that'll either click or it won't. If it doesn't it's back to the drawing board...

Wish me luck! I'm off to races or the meat market! lol

DAY 8 - 30 SONGS IN 30 DAYS

 Day 8: A song about drugs or alcohol

*"White Rabbit" is one of Grace Slick's earliest songs, written during December 1965 or January 1966. It uses imagery found in the fantasy works of Lewis Carroll—1865's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its 1871 sequel Through the Looking-Glass—such as changing size after taking pills or drinking an unknown liquid.

Slick wrote the lyrics first, then composed the music at a red upright piano she had bought for US$50 with eight or ten keys missing—"that was OK because I could hear in my head the notes that weren't there" —moving between major chords for the verses and chorus. She said that the music was heavily influenced by Miles Davis's 1960 album Sketches of Spain, particularly Davis's treatment of the Concierto de Aranjuez (1939). She later said: "Writing weird stuff about Alice backed by a dark Spanish march was in step with what was going on in San Francisco then. We were all trying to get as far away from the expected as possible."

Slick said the composition was supposed to be a slap to parents who read their children such novels and then wondered why their children later used drugs. She later commented that all fairytales read to little girls have a Prince Charming who comes and saves them. But Alice did not; she was on her own in a very strange place, but she kept on going and followed her curiosity – "that's the White Rabbit." A lot of women could have taken a message from that story about how you can push your own agenda. The line "feed your head" is about reading, as well as psychedelics feed your head by paying attention: read some books, pay attention.

Characters Slick referenced include Alice, the White Rabbit, the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the White Knight, the Red Queen, and the Dormouse. Slick reportedly wrote the song after an acid trip.

For Slick, "White Rabbit" "is about following your curiosity. The White Rabbit is your curiosity."For her and others in the 1960s, drugs were a part of mind expansion and social experimentation. With its enigmatic lyrics, "White Rabbit" became one of the first songs to sneak drug references past censors on the radio. Even Marty Balin, Slick's eventual rival in Jefferson Airplane, regarded the song as a "masterpiece." In interviews, Slick has related that Alice in Wonderland was often read to her as a child and remained a vivid memory well into her adulthood.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Slick mentioned that, in addition to Alice in Wonderland, her other inspiration for the song was Ravel's Boléro. Like Boléro, "White Rabbit" is essentially one long crescendo. The music combined with the song's lyrics strongly suggests the sensory distortions experienced with hallucinogens, and the song was later used in pop culture to imply or accompany just such a state.

The song was first played by the Great Society in a bar in San Francisco in early 1966, and later when they opened the bill for bigger bands like the Grateful Dead. They made a series of demo records for Autumn Records, for which they were assisted by Sly Stone. Grace Slick said: "We were so bad that Sly eventually played all the instruments so the demo would sound OK." When Slick joined Jefferson Airplane later in 1966, she taught the song to the band, who recorded it for their album Surrealistic Pillow. "White Rabbit" is in the key of F-sharp which Slick acknowledges "is difficult for guitar players as it requires some intricate fingering."

* (borrowed from Wikipedia)