Today, My Best Friend…Tomorrow, Who Knows?

Sometime last week, during the spate of coverage on the demise of Osama bin Laden, I happened upon a program on the life of the iconic terrorist.

One of the people interviewed was described as bin Laden’s best friend as a teenager.

It must make a pretzel of the mind to have such a notorious character as a former best friend.

The first best friend that I can remember having was a kid named George. There’s little else I recall aside from his name and I have no recollection as to what earned him status as numero uno amigo.

I do recall that I stripped him of the title and I slotted another classmate into the position.

I wanted John as my best friend because he was tall, a head taller than everyone else.

(people have been placed in high office using such logic, but I was five)

I’ve had no contact with either of these kids in almost forty years, but it seems as though George is a DJ in the upper Midwest, so perhaps I was being prescient about the interest I’d someday have in music.

By the time I reached high school, I was in a transitional period with friendships. The concept of best friend had evolved into a group of eight or nine of us who would end up together in different permutations and numbers.

One of these buddies was a bit of a fire enthusiast and devotee of things that go kaboom.

During senior year, Kirk The Pyro went to California with another of our friends for spring break.

(most of us settled for wandering the malls in Cincinnati)

This dynamic duo returned to the grimness of March in the Midwest with tans and dynamite.

“Where did you get dynamite?”

“Tijuana”

“So, you brought dynamite from Tijuana on your flight home from California?”

It was a simpler world and a time when – relative to today – the airlines essentially had a don’t ask/don’t tell policy.

The interviewee on the television screen had described bin Laden as quiet and polite, their friendship rooted in a shared love for soccer.

I could only describe Kirk The Pyro as like Woody Woodpecker in human form and our bond forged by a common appreciation for antics, hijinks, and shenanigans.

And though I haven’t had contact with him since college, I also haven’t seen him become the target of a global manhunt.

Here are four friend songs…

Clarence Clemons And Jackson Browne – You’re A Friend Of Mine
from Hero

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band were probably as big as any act in my lifetime. During the mid-’80s. Born In The USA sold ten million copies and pretty much every song on the record got extensive airplay on the radio. The group’s success was so massive and demand for more music so great that b-sides like Pink Cadillac and Stand On It got played heavily.

E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons even had a solo hit during the winter of ’85 when he duetted with Jackson Browne on the upbeat and catchy You’re A Friend Of Mine.

The Rolling Stones – Waiting On A Friend
from Tattoo You

Personally, I’ve always thought that Waiting On A Friend was one of the Stones’ finest post-’70s moments. The song is so casual and the vibe so laid-back that it’s always welcome when it pops up on shuffle.

Apparently it was the first video by the Stones played on MTV (with reggae great Peter Tosh hanging out on the steps).

Grateful Dead – Friend Of The Devil
from Skeletons From The Closet: The Best Of Grateful Dead

Grateful Dead got discovered my generation while I was in college when A Touch Of Gray put the venerable band all over MTV. I liked the song and I even liked a lot of its parent album, In The Dark, which was played often in the record store where I worked.

I’ve also enjoyed stuff from their catalog as I’ve been introduced to it here and there, but I’ve never felt the rabid passion for The Dead that they inspired in a lot of my peers.

Jellyfish – He’s My Best Friend
from Spilt Milk

I discovered Jellyfish when the record store where I worked received a promo copy of the band’s debut, Bellybutton, in 1990. The psychedelic album cover was eye-catching and the music earned the group from San Francisco comparisons to greats like Queen, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, XTC, and Cheap Trick.

Despite plenty of swooning by critics, Jellyfish was unable to find mainstream success and would split up after just one more album, 1993′s Spilt Milk, but the group has continued to loom large in the hearts of power pop devotees for the past two decades.

Harpsichord Everywhere

Often the dots of the universe connect in a surprisingly delightful and unusual manner.

Like sleep-addled groundhogs, Paloma and I poked our heads out last weekend, peered about, and realized that the tundra had thawed, leaving us with peerless weather and warmth.

We headed out.

Paloma manned the Sirius satellite radio that she had gotten me for Christmas, delighting in the array of options and searching for The Smiths.

Momentarily, she idled on the ’70s station long enough for the screen of the radio to display Maureen McGovern – The Morning After (’72) and the opening notes of the hit from the The Poseidon Adventure to play.

“I like that song,” I told her. “It has harpsichord in it.”

She quickly moved on, unswayed by the lure of the harpischord.

I vaguely remember The Morning After from the time, though I do remember the slew of ’70s disaster flicks – Airport ’75, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno – that featured all-star casts and would air as The ABC Sunday Night Movie.

A few days later, I happened to read Lawrence Welk, Pop Star over at The Hits Just Keep On Comin’. I read with interest as Paloma and I will often watch when we come across an episode of The Lawrence Welk Show.

JB noted that the song Calcutta, Welk’s Number One hit from 1961, features harpsichord.

Harpsichord.

I had to do a bit of sleuthing to find more songs with harpsichord.

There were a number that I immediately recognized, songs like Simon & Garfunkel’s Scarborough Fair/Canticle, Mamas & Papas’ Monday Monday, Yardbirds’ For Your Love, Paul Muriat’s Love Is Blue, The Beatles’ Piggies, and Partridge Family’s I Think I Love You.

I might be able to bang out a few chords on guitar, but I’m not a musician. I don’t think that I ever really pondered the harpsichord I was hearing in those songs.

I’m not even sure that I knew that what I was hearing was harpsichord.

However, to paraphrase Marcia Brady, I don’t know how to build a clock, but I know how to tell time and, though I might know little about the harpsichord, I can still enjoy what it brings to a song.

Here are four songs with harpsichord…

Asia – Ride Easy
from Anthologia: The 20th Anniversary/Geffen Years Collection (1982-1990)

I was completely smitten with Asia’s self-titled debut in ’82 and – somewhere – I still have a poster of the album cover. That poster inspired me to suggest the Asia dragon as potential artwork when Paloma was searching for something to cover a tattoo.

(she didn’t find the idea as grand as I did, but, then again, she wasn’t a fourteen-year old boy in 1982)

Yet, grand is an appropriate description of the quartet’s debut album and it shouldn’t be surprising that a band whose drummer had a gong would find room for harpsichord, too.

Ride Easy was the b-side to Asia’s first hit, Heat Of The Moment, and not included on their debut album much to my dismay at the time as I’d only get to hear it when I’d punch it up on a jukebox.

Maureen McGovern – The Morning After
from Have A Nice Decade: The ’70s Pop Culture Box

I seem to hear The Morning After at least once a week while listening to Sirius’ ’70s station on the morning commute to work and that’s fine by me.

There’s something about the song that I dig. Maybe it’s the sheer melodrama of it all, but, if you’re going to have a theme song about a luxury liner capsized by a massive tidal wave – and Ernest Borgnine is in the cast – I suppose that it’s no time to be timid.

Rolling Stones – Play With Fire
from Big Hits: High Tide And Green Grass

I fully admit that The Stones have been phoning it in for so long now that it has affected my view of them. And that makes it all the more astounding when something pre-Goats Head Soup pops up on the iPod.

Play With Fire is truly menacing and menace is a vibe which The Stones were once as capable of capturing as well as any band ever has.

Jellyfish – The King Is Half-Undressed
from Bellybutton

I discovered Jellyfish when the record store where I worked received a promo copy of the band’s debut, Bellybutton, in 1990. The psychedelic album cover was eye-catching and the music earned the group from San Francisco comparisons to greats like Queen, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, XTC, and Cheap Trick.

Despite plenty of swooning by critics, Jellyfish was unable to find mainstream success and would split up after just one more album, 1993’s Spilt Milk, but the group has continued to loom large in the hearts of power pop devotees for the past two decades.

Be forewarned, I listened to The King Is Half-Undressed the other morning as I hadn’t heard it for awhile. That was two days ago and I still haven’t been able to get it out of my head.

That’s Right, The King Is Going To Have Us All Fat And Happy

Rejoice remote Thai villagers, Inuits of Greenland, and all other begrimed peoples who have yet to smell the bright lights of civilization. W was correct and freedom is on the march. But it won’t be any god, government or game show which will bring you the riches we in the modern world take for granted.

It will be a king. Specifically, The King.

I long ago declared allegiance to Burger King. Actually, fast food wasn’t often on the menu growing up, but once I got to college and occasionally opted for a burger from under a sunlamp, it was the flame-broiled goodness I would usually crave.

Burger Kings were plentiful in Southeast Asia when I had the opportunity to trek through that part of the world. I still cannot hear Def Leppard’s Rocket without picturing the girl at the counter in a Singapore BK Lounge. She sang along with that song (not quite at the top of her lungs) as she took an order from me and my friend Simon.

In one recent commercial, The King appears in a man’s yard. The man looks away and when he looks back, The King is right in front of him, standing on the porch offering a delicious breakfast sandwich.

Paloma finds it to be creepy. Yes, perhaps it is a bit creepy, but it’s also a wonderful thing.

In another series of ads, people from more isolated places around the world get to enjoy a Whopper. As you can imagine, the footage reveals it to be quite possibly the most amazing moments of their lives except for one Inuit fellow who declares that he still prefers seal meat.

(I hope this ungrateful bastard’s next encounter with Western culture involves a visit from PETA)

I also read the other day that obesity among most of the world’s population is skyrocketing (for various reasons). Finally, a global consensus on something.

So those of you dismayed by the state of the human race, take heart, because a glorious new age of peace and harmony, love and understanding, is coming – a portly new world order and we will all bow to The King.

Marillion – The King Of Sunset Town
I suppose it was never cool to admit liking Marillion, yes? But there is a chunk of their catalog which I do love and their album Season’s End would be on the list. I stumbled across it, not even knowing they had a new album, while in Thailand. Less rigidly progressive and looser conceptually, it was their first record with new singer Steve Hogarth, who immediately reminded me of Peter Gabriel.

Jellyfish – The King Is Half-Undressed
There’s little I could say in praise of Jellyfish which wasn’t covered quite nicely over at My Humps – here.

R.E.M. – The King Of Comedy
1994’s Monster was the last time I truly cared about R.E.M. and I’d been with them most of the way up ‘til then (I was in college in the ‘80s; it was the law). I did like Monster and I thought that the King Of Comedy, a shimmering slab of ear candy, was an overlooked gem.

The Rave-Ups – Respectfully King Of Rain
I didn’t know the Rave-Ups were from Pittsburgh but apparently they were. I did know that Molly Ringwald was a friend of the band which led to them appearing in Pretty In Pink (performing the stellar Positively Lost Me). Respectfully King Of Rain is pretty wonderful, too.