All Summer Long Friday Random Ten

As a relaxing and productive summer comes to an end and I get ready to go back to school, I feel like Merle Haggard's "If We Make It Through December." The recession greatly affected both Kim and I, and we are busy putting out financial fires. This will be the case for a while to come.

In the meantime, this next year will almost certainly be the busiest of my life. The second year of nursing school is even more intense than the first. I also may work a second job. What the hell-- I can sleep when I'm done with nursing school.

Today's big task is to wait for the delivery of the oxygen equipment for my mother-in-law, whom my wife and I are taking care of for three weeks while my father-in-law has surgery and recuperates.

1. I'm Going To Say It Now- Phil Ochs
2. Holding Back The Tears- Simply Red
3. You're Gonna Miss Me- Roky Erikson
4. More Than This- Roxy Music
5. Sky High- Jigsaw
6. Neighborhood Bully- Bob Dylan
7. Hong Kong Garden- Siouxie and the Banshees
8. Shake Your Hips- The Rolling Stones
9. Miss You- The Rolling Stones
10. Funk #49- The James Gang


Notes:
1. Phil Ochs' homage to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.
2. One of those songs that brings me back to the place I heard it-- a downtown Chicago restaurant I worked at right when I got out of college in the mid eighties.
3. Learned to play this one in a guitar class at the Old Town School of Folk Music. I now associate it with the movie "High Fidelity;" it's the song at the beginning of that movie.
4. Another song I now associate with a movie-- this is the song Bill Murray karoakes to in "Lost In Translation."
5. A seventies one-hit wonder
6. Dylan's ironic take on Mideast politics, from the terrific "Infidels" album.
7. A seventies hit for Siouxie and crew.
8. From "Exile On Main Street," the greatest rock and roll record ever produced.
9. One good Stones song deserves another. This song brings me right back to the summer of 1978, which I'm trying not to think was 32 years ago.
10. The James Gang formed at Kent State University (yes, that Kent State University) in the late sixties. Its most famous alumnus is Joe Walsh.