Sooooo…The Phone Can Tell Me If It’s Raining?

I have never negotiated a hostage release.

I am not a surgeon awaiting word that an organ needed for me to perform a transplant is on ice.

Those are two of a cornucopia of reasons that I didn’t bother getting a cellphone until two years ago.

The phone I have is basic, a mere conveyance for telecommunication that would have been an impressive device in a ’70s sci-fi flick from my childhood.

It would have still wowed us when I was in college and Gordon Gekko had a mobile phone the size of a brick pressed to his head.

My phone doesn’t talk to me or advise me.

I keep seeing a commercial for the iPhone in which Zooey Deschanel asks her phone if it’s raining.

Her home doesn’t appear to be very large. In fact, it has a cozy bungalow feel. So, unless the place isn’t hers and she secretely lives in the attic, there has to be a window within a few steps.

In fact, as the voice in the phone gives an affirmative on the precipitation, Zooey is shown peering out the window.

Thus, you might not need a weatherman, to know which way the wind blows, but apparently a talking phone is needed to know if it is raining.

I’ve read that mountain gorillas in the wild have been observed to remain in their nests, delaying the start of their day, if they wake and it is raining.

Without a phone to tell them, the gorillas are able to figure out that it is indeed raining and have the good sense to stay in bed.

Undoubtedly, they will be ruling the planet in the future.

A search for songs about “talk” yielded a few dozen. Here are four of them that seemed good for today…

The Tubes – Talk To Ya Later
from The Completion Backward Principle (1981)

I was well acquainted with The Tubes via a high school buddy who worshipped the band. Though The Completion Backward Principle probably mortified long-time fans of the band’s more outrageous stuff, my friends and I loved it.

The slick, new-wave tinged Talk To Ya Later featured Toto’s Steve Lukather on guitar was infectious beyond belief and its title became our salutation for years to come.

A Flock Of Seagulls – (It’s Not Me) Talking
from Listen (1983)

When A Flock Of Seagulls arrived with I Ran (So Far Away) and their self-titled debut, I quickly adopted the Liverpool quartet as my own. I was hearing the music of the future and I wasn’t about to be left behind.

The future was short-lived, but it was fun while it lasted and the band left behind more than just their lone hit in an underrated catalog that produced two wildly entertaining albums.

The hyperkinteic (It’s Not Me) Talking is about a man who believes that he is receiving messages from aliens in his head.

The Alan Parsons Project – Let’s Talk About Me
from Vulture Culture (1985)

The progressive-pop/rock consortium The Alan Parsons produced a string of successful albums during the latter half of the ’70s and early ’80s. Songs like I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You, Games People Play, Eye In The Sky, and Don’t Answer Me were radio staples during those years.

Vulture Culture marked the beginning of the decline in The Alan Parsons Project’s commercial fortunes. However, I did hear the catchy Let’s Talk About Me fairly often on rock radio during the spring of ’85.

Bongwater – Everybody’s Talkin’
from The Big Sell-Out (1992)

I discovered the avant-garde, art-rock duo Bongwater through Paloma with their gorgeous cover of Roky Erickson’s You Don’t Love Me, Yet on a various artist tribute to the Austin cult musician.

On The Big Sell-Out, Bongwater’s final release, the pair offered up a strange, surreal take on the Fred Neil/Harry Neilsen classic Everybody’s Talkin’ that reimagines it as a spoken word tale delivered by a failed actress who has had a nervous breakdown and believes she is actually working with suicidal people.

Shuffling Slowly Toward Sound Fidelity

It was during this week in 1982, that I graduated from grade school.

I’m not sure if it was because of our small town’s agrairian past – when not everyone went on to high school – or if it was the chance to inject excitement into the sleepy hum of daily life, but the event was treated with considerable pomp and circumstance.

As a kid that, like a lot of kids, had no use for formalities, I thought most of it was an inconvenient hullabaloo.

But there was an upside to losing a Saturday to ceremony, pictures, uncomfortable clothes, and time spent with adults – cash.

With some of that cash, I made a major purchase, a table top clock radio with a cassette player manufactured by Lloyd’s.

It had only been a year or so since my new interest in music had spurred me to relocate a radio from the basement to my bedroom. It had been on my old man’s workbench or the garage for as long as I could rremember.

It was a battered, oblong box – one corner of the grill covering the 45-sized speaker had separated from the unit and the cord was a scoliotic snake.

It served my purposes well during those early months as I explored the world of radio. And, in the time it took for me to open a cardboard box, it had become a childhood artifact.

This new purchase – what my buddy Beej dubbed “the Lloyds beast” – also made obsolete a portable cassette player from the ’70s that I used to listen to the handful of albums I owned.

(it was also used it to make primitive mix tapes of songs recorded by positioning the built-in microphone of the device as close as possible to the speaker of the radio)

This new acquisition – what my buddy Beej dubbed “the Lloyd’s beast” – was, though merely a small step toward fidelity, a great technological leap forward for me.

Beej had an older brother. He was already reading Stereo Review, yammering about specs and Hirsch-Houk Laboratories, and putting together a stereo system.

I would soon begin to eye the magnificent components he was acquiring and go in the that direction, too.

(as soon as I was able to scrape together the funding, a slow process that neccesitated my buying one component at a time over the course of an entire summer)

But, twenty-nine years ago, the “Lloyd’s beast” was possibly my most prized possession.

Here are four songs that I vividly recall from that time…

Human League – Don’t You Want Me
from Dare

Had I had interest in music a few years earlier, either disco or punk might have been the “new” sound that my friends and I would have adopted as our own. I’m grateful that, instead, New Wave and synthesizer bands from the UK turned out to be our find.

Human League’s Don’t You Want Me had to have been one of the first songs by a synth band I heard and I it hooked me. My buddy Streuss was obsessive about the band, spending the next year or so focused on collecting every single, 12″ inch single, EP, remix, and whatever else he could acquire by the Sheffield band.

Toto – Rosanna
from Toto IV

I have no qualms in acknowledging that I own most of Toto’s albums up through the mid-’80s and I rarely hit skip when one of their songs pops up on shuffle.

Rosanna was a constant on the radio during the summer of ’82 – all summer long – and I don’t think I ever tired of it. It’s still as joyously infectious all of these years later.

Kim Wilde – Kids In America
from Kim Wilde

We didn’t know much about Kim Wilde when she arrived with the New Wave bubblegum of her song Kids In America. She was a comely blonde and I imagine that’s all we needed to know.

But we did love the song. It bounded along. It had a chanted chorus. It was about kids in America and we happened to be kids in America.

It had it all.

J. Geils Band – Angel In Blue
from Freeze Frame

Although I was fairly lukewarm about the song Centerfold, I’d gotten a copy of J. Geils Band’s Freeze Frame as a gift and most of the rest of the album I loved. I don’t think any of us knew that the band had actually been around for more than a decade and was known to music fans as America’s answer to The Rolling Stones (I, at that time, certainly didn’t).

Although it wasn’t nearly as big as Centerfold or Freeze Frame‘s title track, Angel In Blue – a wistful ode to a girl from the wrong side of the tracks with the obligatory heart of gold – was a favorite then and, like that waitress, it hasn’t aged a bit.

The Road Ends In Rangoon

There are, according to one number I found on some site, twenty-five thousand Elvis impersonators walking the earth.

Elvis impersonator was the result I got when I searched online a couple weeks ago for the answer to Paloma’s query, “Whatever happened to…?”

The person in question was some kid we knew from a record store twenty years ago. And, technically, he wasn’t a stage performer but, according to my findings, merely impersonating Elvis on vocal tracks for impersonators to use in live performances.

And, thanks to the wonders of the internet I learned that our former co-worker had worked with some character touted to be the most beloved Elvis impersonator in Estonia…or maybe it was Luxemburg.

That intrigued me.

Then it turned out that this Estonian (or possibly Luxemburgian) Elvis had campaigned for some politician friend whose apparently extreme positions had caused people to “on numerous occasions” pour beer over his head.

As for this almost Elvis…the most bizarre thing I found was some article on an obscure news site from Southeast Asia. Estonian (or possibly Luxemburgian) Elvis had performed in some small, volatile country by invitation of a colonel from the ruling military junta.

Unfortunately, my brain took a man impersonating a singer known for garish fashion choices, Southeast Asia, and dodgy circumstances, chewed on it, and spat out “Gary Glitter.”

Dodgy, indeed.

That synaptic connection was made more unfortunate when the article mentioned Estonian (or possibly Luxemburgian) Elvis had caused a stir with his efforts to kiss the women in the audience, left the country quickly and had some trouble with the authorities.

It appears that our our former co-worker’s association with Estonian (or possibly Luxemburgian) Elvis had been a good decade ago, so perhaps he wasn’t on this road to Rangoon.

Yet, I couldn’t help but imagine him getting mixed up in some zany scenario.

(he had show business aspirations and didn’t strike me as being the most worldly of cats)

My mind conjured up plots with him as an unwitting patsy and, in the guise of paying homage to The King, running guns for a military junta in some far-flung Southeastern nation.

I couldn’t imagine things turning out well.

Because of my age, I know more of Elvis Costello’s catalog than that of Elvis Presley. I realize that I have most of his albums from the ’80s and a few other scattered tracks.

I enjoy a lot of Costello’s music, but I’ve never gotten to know it as well or enjoyed it with as as enthusiasm as I think I should. Maybe that’s because I’ve known a number of rabidly devoted Costello fans through the years.

Here are four songs by Elvis Costello that I do quite like…

Elvis Costello – Alison
from My Aim Is True

There’s a lot of speculation on the meaning of Allison and there’s speculation that Allison meets an untimely fate. I just dig the languid melody and Costello’s croon.

And, backing Costello pre-Attractions is a band from San Francisco, Clover, which included a News-less Huey Lewis (though he doesn’t appear on Allison)

Elvis Costello & The Attractions – Everyday I Write the Book
from Punch The Clock

I don’t think I’d ever heard Elvis Costello until I came across Everyday I Write The Book on 97X in the early autumn of ’83. But, I did love this song from the outset and it’s still one of my favorites of his.

Elvis Costello & The Attractions – Shipbuilding
from Punch The Clock

Shipbuilding is simply gorgeous albeit resigned and world weary, and a sad reminder that armed conflict is generally a profitable endeavor.

(particularly if you’re Halliburton)

Elvis Costello & The Attractions – The Only Flame In Town
from Goodbye Cruel World

A year after Everyday I Write The Book became one of Elvis Costello’s few mainstream hits, he nearly managed to make the Top 40 again with the shuffling, shiny The Only Flame In Town.

(and he’s joined on the song by Daryl Hall)