Ergo, the Ogre

Author: Ergo, the Ogre

  • Obscurity

    Obscurity

    It’s time for Song Lyrics Sunday with the New Epic Writer, Jim Adams of A Unique Title for Me Fame. Today our mission is to choose a song with the words fix or make in the title or lyrics. So, I’ve chosen a song by a genius named Mayf Nutter titled, I Don’t Care. It’s a piece of work, indeed.

    Lyrics

    Sittin all alone by myself in the easy chair

    Watching TV drinkin beer in my underwear

    Telephone rings there’s a knock upon the door.

    I crawl through the house, finally got my sneakers on

    Run to the door everybody there was gone

    Didn’t have time to answer the telephone

    Just let the dang thing ring.

    I don’t care.

    I remember back when I was just a little kid

    Always wanted to do everything bigger people did

    Didn’t like the way everyone seemed huger than me

    Sent in the mail to get a muscle-building course

    Figured it’d make a little kid stronger than a horse

    Built me a Physy-Q everyone was jealous of,

    but I grew out of that

    I don’t care. Very much. I don’t care.

    Save me a quarter for a ticket to the Burly-Q

    Walked right in ‘cause I thought I’d see a girl or two

    Up on the stage you never seen such carryin on

    One of them girls undressed ‘till everything was bare

    Jumped off the stage come and run her fingers through my hair

    Sat on my lap….said I’s a pretty thing.

    Plumb made me mad.

    Spilled my popcorn.

    Sittin all alone by myself in the easy chair

    Watching TV drinkin beer in my underwear

    Telephone rings there’s a knock upon the door.

    I crawl through the house, finally got my sneakers on

    Run to the door everybody there was gone.

    Again.

    So I just put my clothes on and went on over to my own house.

    The Story

    Mayf has a very impressive portfolio of music and acting credits, from his earliest works as Del Shannon’s guitarist, through his work with the New Christy Minstrels, to his solo musical career…and, of course, an impressive body of acting credits. This promo single (I Don’t Care) was sent to US radio stations in late 1972/early 1973, however, it failed to make the US country charts. The track was also included on Mayf’s later LP, “Goin’ Skinny Dippin”, which was a collection of his recordings for the GNP-Crescendo label.

    Born Mayfred Nutter on October 19th 1941 in Jane Lew, West Virginia. He later shortened it to Mayf in 1957 after playing on All-star Babe Ruth baseball team when a Sportswriter kept having difficulty spelling correctly. So the writer just shortened it to Mayf and it stuck Mayf was asked by Buck Owens to be apart of the Emerging Bakersfield Sound, West Coast Country Music. He had a string of TV and movie roles starting in the b&w western, Gunsmoke, as Festus Hagans cousin. Most noted for his portrayal of Bobby Bigelow, leader of the band known on Walton’s Mountain as the Haystack Gang, as well as Parker Winslow who was Valene Ewing’s boyfriend on Knotts Landing.

    – IMDb Mini Biography By: James Hammond

    • Rock icon, Frank Zappa formed a new record label, just for Mayf Nutter. He called it Straight Records and the first release, “Everybody’s Talkin’” from the movie Midnight Cowboy, hit the top of radio play lists across the U.S. and in Europe. The musicians were Merle Haggard’s Strangers. The song was cut in a horse barn that Merle had converted into a studio at his Bakersfield home.
    • Soon Capitol Records released more Mayf Nutter Hits including “Never Ending Love“, “Green Door“, “Party Doll and The Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy“.
    • Next Mayf wrote the crowd pleasing songs, “Goin’ Skinny Dippin’” and “Jamboree In The Hills” (the song), and others.
    • Mayf also has the distinction of writing and recording the first environmental impact song. “Simpson Creek Won’t Never Run Clean Again“. Directly influenced by the message in the song, mining companies yielded to public outcry and restored life to every stream in Mayf’s native county in West Virginia. All life forms had been previously killed by pollution. A Mayf Nutter Week Celebration resulted.
    • While flying over miles of the now famous, Alaskan oil slick, on his way to a concert in Anchorage, Mayf witnessed the environmental devastation brought on by the tragic oil spill caused by the tanker ship, Exxon Valdez. That night, as he often does in live performances, he decided to write a song on stage using suggestions from the audience. Moments later “The Ballad Of Valdez” had the audience laughing hysterically. Within a week the song was recorded and being played on all formats of radio from Country to Talk shows. It was featured on ABC TV, CBS TV and was used on network News shows for months. 100% of Artist Royalties went to restore fish and wildlife in Alaska.
    • His LIVE PERFORMANCES range from Las Vegas Headliner to Carnegie Hall. From the Los Angeles Coliseum (65,000 fans) to The Grand Ole Opry. From the WWVA World’s Original Jamboree in Wheeling, West Virginia to the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Center in the Peoples Republic Of China in 1982 (the concert was broadcast “live” on China National TV). Thus, Mayf became, historically, the very First American to ever sing on China National Television.

    Mayf now resides in Southern CA with his wife, the former Lindsay Bloom (a former Miss USA and star of “Mike Hammer”, “Dallas”, and movies, singer/dancer/comedy actress on “The Dean Martin Show”). They have three children.

    Mayf’s “Secret for Happiness and Success” is: “Find something you would do for nothing, and find someone to pay you for it”. His life’s goal is to “Go about doing Good” as Jesus did. Learn more about Mayf Nutter here.

  • Nulling the Void

    Nulling the Void

    The Sunday Writing Prompt over at Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie is Reasons for Admission. We are to choose one or more of the “afflictions” listed above that qualified for Admissions to a Women’s Insane Asylum, 1864-1889. Ignore the circled item.

    It all started when I got married and realized what a farce it was. Especially the sex part. My whole life I’d heard about how wonderful it was and how much I would enjoy it. Either everybody was wrong, or my husband was hopelessly inept. The poor slob had zero eye-hand coordination and couldn’t find his own butt with a road map.

    Do I know how to pick ’em, or what?

    I learned quickly that if one wants something done properly, one must do it one’s self. So I did. A lot. Afterward, I’d roll myself a nice, fat cigarette and light up. The two kind of go hand in hand—pardon the pun.

    Well, wouldn’t you just know that I’d get caught in the act? Both of them.

    And that dear friends, is what landed me here in this charming asylum.

  • A Moment

    A Moment

    It’s that time again! Song Lyric Sunday with Jim Adams of A Unique Title for Me. This week Jim has asked us to choose a song that contains either Arrivederci, Bon-voyage, Ciao, Farewell, Goodbye, Hasta la vista, Sayonara or Shalom in the title or the lyrics. Well, I am not known for my ability to follow directions, which is not an excuse. Well, maybe it is. In this case, I just couldn’t help myself. Nothing says ‘goodbye’ like this killer piece, IMO. Anyway, I chose this heartbreaker of a song by Billy Vera & the Beaters, “At This Moment.” I tear-up just reading the lyrics.

    The Lyrics

    What did you think
    I would do at this moment
    When you’re standing before me
    With tears in your eyes
    Trying to tell me
    that you have found you another
    and you just don’t love me no more

    What did you think
    I would say at this moment
    When I’m faced with the knowledge
    That you just don’t love me
    Did you think I would curse you
    Or say things to hurt you
    ’cause you just don’t love me no more

    Did you think
    I could hate you
    Or raise my hands to you
    Now come on you know me too well
    How could I hurt you
    when darling I love you
    and you know
    I’d never, never hurt you-oo-wo-oo…

    What do you think
    I would give at this moment
    If you’d stay
    I’d subtract twenty years from my life
    I’d fall down on my knees
    and kiss the ground that you walk on
    If I could just hold you again

    I’d fall down on my knees
    I’d kiss the ground that you walk on baby
    If I could just hold you

    If I, could just hold you
     
    If I, if I could just hold-hold you, again

    The Story (Song Facts)

    • Billy Vera talked about the inspiration for this song when he spoke with Eric Greenberg on the Just My Show podcast. Said Vera: “I was living still in New York, and I met a young college girl, about 20 years old. We started dating – she told me she had just broken up with her boyfriend, and she described what he went through when she gave him the bad news. And she was very descriptive.

      So I went home and I was impressed by what he must have been feeling. I wrote the first two-thirds of the song based on my imagination of what this guy was feeling. And I couldn’t finish it, I just couldn’t figure out how it ended. And then about 9-10 months later, when she broke up with me, I had gotten very emotionally involved with her, and then I knew how the song ended. And that was the famous line that everybody remembers: ‘I’d subtract 20 years of my life.’

      We stayed in touch for a long time. She was one of these sort of narcissistic girls that like the idea of somebody mooning over her for years, and I did.”
    • Billy Vera was born William McCord Jr. He had some success as a songwriter with the #1 country hit “I Really Got the Feeling,” which Dolly Parton recorded. He wrote “At This Moment” in 1977, but no one wanted to record it, although Dionne Warwick and Olivia Newton-John came close to doing so. Billy Vera And The Beaters finally released it in 1981 as the followup to their first single, “I Can Take Care of Myself” (#39 in the US) on the Japanese-owned Alfa label, and it stalled at #79 on the charts.

      The song was revived when it was used in three episodes of the hit TV show Family Ties in 1985 and 1986, as a backdrop for romantic interludes between Alex P. Keaton (played by Michael J. Fox) and Ellen Reed (played by Tracy Pollan, who became Fox’s wife in real life). Vera told Just My Show: “I thought that was gonna be it. You know, everybody had high hopes for that song. But they wanted to put out an up-tempo song to start off the album, and they did. They had a very good promotion man, Bernie was his name. And he wasn’t getting along with the boss. So he quit just as ‘At This Moment’ came out. The guy they hired to take his place, he couldn’t have promoted the Beatles. He was this terrible promotion man. So that’s why ‘At This Moment’ didn’t do what it should have done. And as it turns out, very often, it was better that it happened five years later.”
    • The first Billy Vera & The Beaters album was recorded live, so when this was used in Family Ties, only the live version existed. Vera explains: “We re-recorded pieces of the song. In other words, they’d need 12 seconds here, or 20 seconds there in the show. So we went in and recorded just those pieces in the studio without the audience, because the audience would have been annoying, to the TV viewer. The thing that made it work better the second time was that the story of the song, boy-loses-girl, was the story of the episode, “Boy Loses Girl.” The first time they used the song, it was when he met the girl.”
    • It was the tears of Michael J. Fox that propelled this song to the top of the charts, but just getting a recording of the song out there was quite a feat.

      And then one afternoon I got a phone call, and this guy said, ‘Hey I produce a show called Family Ties, and some of us were at your show the other night, and we heard you do this song that we thought would be perfect for an episode that we have coming up. I got my publisher to make a deal for that with them.

      I got a bag full of mail. Now, I had had other songs on TV shows before, and never gotten any mail from it. But I got a bag full of mail from NBC, you know, ‘Who’s the singer? What’s the name of the song? Where can we buy it?’ Well, it was no longer out, so you couldn’t buy it. So I got the idea, Well, maybe somebody will let me record it again. I went to all the record companies where I still had some contacts, and nobody was interested at all. And then I was talking to a fellow by the name of Richard Foos who owned a company called Rhino Records, which was in the business of re-issuing oldies, and I told him what had happened. I said, ‘Hey Richard, how many records do you need to sell to break even?’ He had low overhead at the time, because it was a small company. He said, ‘Oh, about 2,000 copies.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what, I’ll guarantee 2,000 albums. I can sell them in the clubs if need be. Will you put it out?’ He said, ‘Sure.’

      So they licensed the recordings, the whole album, from Alfa. And by the time they got it out, we missed the re-runs. That was bad, but at least I had records to sell in the clubs. And then the following season, they used the song again, only this time the girl broke up with Michael J. Fox, and Michael J. Fox played the song on the jukebox and started crying, and America responded like crazy. NBC called us up, they said, ‘My God, we’ve never had any response like this in the history of the network for a song. The switchboards are lighting up, we’re getting letters, telegrams, where can we find this record?’ Well, luckily, Rhino had the record out. So people started calling radio stations, which never happens. I mean, it was a total organic hit. You know, Rhino wasn’t in the business of contemporary music, so they didn’t have any promotion, they didn’t do any payola, it was just that the people demanded the record, and thank goodness, radio listened and played it.

      And it just kept shooting up the charts week after week after week. Next thing you know the phone’s ringing off the hook, word got out that I was a free agent, I didn’t have a record deal, so all these record companies started wanting me to sign with them, and we were on all these television shows. Dick Clark was wonderful to us. He put me on every single one of his shows; American Bandstand and all the rest of them. He was just great to us.”
    • Vera played the unsavory character Duke Weatherill on four episodes of Beverly Hills, 90210 in the early ’90s. In addition to occasional acting and voiceover work, Vera continued to perform with The Beaters into the ’00s. He told Greenberg: “I’m an old-school performer. I came up at the tail end of the old days. I played the Apollo Theater, where you had to compete, and people wanted to know who you were. They wanted to connect with you as a person, not just a voice that sings a song. That changed in the late ’60s. You know, when we say the ’60s, we mean after 1967. The ’60s didn’t really start ’til ’67. But before that, you had to entertain. You had to talk to people. You had to make ’em like you. So I always tell stories, not with every song, but with most of the songs.

      Every song has a story – and I don’t mean that every song has to be autobiographical, because I say autobiography is for amateurs. You know, a professional songwriter invents stories. Maybe I’ll see something on a TV show or read something in a book or something you tell me about your girlfriend, and I’ll stir all of those parts together in a gumbo and out comes a whole new story, and that’s the song. And that’s how a professional writes. You know, these amateur songwriters, they think that their angst-ridden lives are so interesting, when it’s just a bunch of crappy drama.”
  • For Some

    For Some

    It’s Poetics Tuesday over at the dVerse Poets Pub. The challenge is to write a poem in the first person that compares some trait of ours with something animal. It should not be a whale, but another creature (mammal, fish, bird, insect, etc.) with which we have something in common. The title should be the animal thing, in the same way Marjorie Saiser chose ‘The Print the Whales Make’.

    For some, love is like

    the fog — sneaking in on

    tiny kitten paws.

    Gently, sweetly almost

    apologetically.

    For others, love comes

    slow and steady like

    a pair of oxen

    fettered together for

    the long haul.

    Nondescript, dependable

    Predictable.

    But for me,

    for me love comes

    screaming in

    like a Spanish bull.

    Wild, sinful thunder

    Deliciously uncontrollable —

    A splendid conflagration —

    Dead on legit.

  • L’Angelo Misterioso

    L’Angelo Misterioso

    It’s Song Lyric Sunday aagain, hosted by the uber-talented writer/blogger, Jim Adams. Today Jim has tasked us with choosing a song with just one word in the title. After a nanosecond of thought, I decided on Badge, by Eric Clapton and Cream. This song has many, many memories attached to it. It will always have a special place in my heart.

    The Particulars, a la Song Facts

    • This was written by Eric Clapton and George Harrison. Harrison, who is listed on the album as “L’Angelo Misterioso,” also played rhythm guitar on this, since Cream had only one guitarist: Clapton.
    • The title has nothing to do with the song. Clapton saw Harrison’s notes for this, and misread “Bridge” as “Badge.” He thought this is what Harrison named the song, so they used it for the title.
    • The lyrics are not intended to make sense. Many of them were taken from drunken conversations Harrison had with Ringo Starr.
    • Cream recorded this shortly before their final shows: two sold-out performances at Royal Albert Hall in England. It was one of three studio recordings on their last album; the rest of it was filled with live cuts.
    • Cream had broken up by the time this was released. Clapton was already working with his new group, Blind Faith.
    • This is one of the shortest Cream songs. They were known for their long, improvised jams. The Wheels Of Fire live album, for example, contains only 4 songs.
    • This is one of the few Cream songs that Eric Clapton sang lead on, as Jack Bruce usually handled vocals. Also, this is the only Cream song to include 5 people: in addition to Clapton, Bruce, Baker and Harrison, Felix Pappalardi played the piano and Mellotron. Pappalardi was the producer of 3 of Cream’s 4 albums (Disreali Gears, Wheels Of Fire, and Goodbye) and contributed by playing a wide variety of instruments on those albums. >>
    • Clapton ran his guitar through a Leslie speaker cabinet to create a swirling sound. The Leslie Cabinet contained a rotating paddle and was designed for organs, but many musicians tried it with guitars. Jimmy Page used the technique on “Good Times, Bad Times.”
    • The song titles were written on tombstones inside the album, leaving little doubt that it was their last.
    • Clapton had played on Harrison’s album Wonderwall the previous year, and on The Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” which was released the same month as this.

    The Lyrics

    Thinkin’ ’bout the times you drove in my car.
    Thinkin’ that I might have drove you too far.
    And I’m thinkin’ ’bout the love that you laid on my table.

    I told you not to wander ’round in the dark.
    I told you ’bout the swans, that they live in the park.
    Then I told you ’bout our kid, now he’s married to mabel.

    Yes, I told you that the light goes up and down.
    Don’t you notice how the wheel goes ’round?
    And you better pick yourself up from the ground
    Before they bring the curtain down,
    Yes, before they bring the curtain down.

    Talkin’ ’bout a girl that looks quite like you.
    She didn’t have the time to wait in the queue.
    She cried away her life since she fell off the cradle.

    The Video