Testy Area 51 - Page 7

Dominique, oh Dominique
Over the land he plods along
Never looking for reward......


Parker

Steve!

First it was drama, now you stun us with your musical abilities!

I now want to nominate Steve Christou for Best Musical Performance in this thread.

Congratulations, Steve....and good luck!

Mine name is pronunced like "tea," hence the "T" in my signature. So that song doesn't work.

I nominate Steve's evil hand for Best Instrumental Performance.

~T

Another CLASSIC from 1973:

My baby makes me proud,
lord don't she make me proud!
She never makes a scene
by hangin' all over me in a crowd!

'Cause people love to talk,
lord don't they love to talk!
But when they turn out the lights,
I know she'll be leaving with me!

When we get behind closed doors,
then she lets her hair hang down
and she makes me glad that I'm a man . . .
Oh no one knows what goes on behind closed doors!

My baby makes me smile,
lord don't she make me smile!
She's never far away
or too tired to say "I want you!"

She's always a lady
just like a lady should be!
But when they turn out the lights,
she's still a baby with me!

When we get behind closed doors,
then she lets her hair hang down
and she makes me glad that I'm a man . . .
Oh no one knows what goes on behind closed doors!

Oh no one knows
what goes on behind closed doors!
( Behind closed doors! Behind closed doors! )
Behind closed doors!

Ladies and Gentlemen, Charlie Rich has left the building.

Is it just me, or is this thread now serving as the gathering place for all the first-generation "Thread Killer" alumni? A much different crowd is in the current incarnation of "Killer" (nice folks, all), but the people who first made that thread into the phenomenon it is today now seem to be posting here.

My 1973-oriented moods?

• Capitol Records releases The Beatles's Red and Blue greatest-hits collections.

• "Quadraphonics" seems to be The Next Big Thing in home audio; turns out to be a poorly executed fad instead.

• Audio Research starts making waves in the emerging world of "high-end" audio with its vacuum tube-based SP-3 preamplifier.

• The first issue of Harry Pearson's The Absolute Sound appears; the "high-end" audio cult begins in earnest.

• The Senate Watergate hearings; the "Saturday Night Massacre"; Richard Nixon's approval ratings plummet.

• A silly "UFO flap" begins in the American South, migrates northward.

• The Exorcist is released; brings people back to the commercial theaters.

• Kawasaki's legendary 903cc Z-1 is released, is the most powerful stock streetbike one can buy.

• I purchased a Marantz 3300 stereophonic preamp, a Marantz 250 power amp, a Marantz Model 125 tuner (with built-in oscilloscope), a Thorens TD-125 Mark II manual turntable, an SME 3009 tonearm, a Shure V-15 Type III magnetic cartridge, and a pair of Rectilinear III speaker systems.

• The Oakland A's win their second of three consecutive World Championships.

• The Miami Dolphins win the Superbowl in January, after having gone undefeated during the regular season.

• My lovely Turkish Angora, Sleepy, gives birth to two delightful bundles of fur'n'buzzes: The Ajax and Vixen.

• Some friends scored some really good Mexican weed. (Parker, you may edit this one out. )

• I pooled resources with some friends and we purchased a gray-market MGM 16mm CinemaScope® lab print of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Other stuff happened that year, but I have a bad cold right now and forget.

On a dark desert(ed) highway, cool wind in my hair
Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim
I had to stop for the night
There she stood in the doorway;
I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself,
'This could be Heaven or this could be Hell'
Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way
There were voices down the corridor,
I thought I heard them say...

Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely face
Plenty of room at the Hotel California
Any time of year, you can find it here

Her mind is Tiffany-twisted, she got the Mercedes bends
She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys, that she calls friends
How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat.
Some dance to remember, some dance to forget

So I called up the Captain,
'Please bring me my wine'
He said, 'We haven't had that spirit here since nineteen sixty nine'
And still those voices are calling from far away,
Wake you up in the middle of the night
Just to hear them say...

Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely face
They livin' it up at the Hotel California
What a nice surprise, bring your alibis

Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said 'We are all just prisoners here, of our own device'
And in the master's chambers,
They gathered for the feast
The stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast

Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
'Relax,' said the night man,
We are programmed to receive.
You can checkout any time you like,
but you can never leave!


Not quite 1973. But, 1976!

Hey, I thought I told you kids, "Lights out"...
uh....
Did somebody mention rum?
As in yo-ho-ho and a bottle o' ?
You had to know that would get me in here.
(swigs)ahhhhhhhhhh.......smooooooth.

Can't we stay up just a few more minutes????????????

............PUH-LEEEEEEEEEEEEEZE????????????????????

I'm, um, still seeing Mary.

And then there was 1974:

• As part of a college sociology assignment, I interview the "workers" at a popular brothel; begin hanging out with one of the "girls," who calls herself "Tiffany"; had a great time;

• Nixon resigns (but not as a result of "Tiffany");

• Paul McCartney's "Junior's Farm" (good guitar riffs, good lyricism, but sense a problem with where rock is headed);

• Said problem: the first incarnations of "arena rock";

• Purchase a 1975 Kawasaki Z-1B 903 in October, the meanest, baddest streetbike of the era (with money won from a lawsuit against the twit who nearly killed me on my Honda CB750K2);

• "Purple Microdot";

• Begin considering electrostatic tweeter drivers from Jensen as a possible add-on to hi-fi system that seems always to need some sort of improvement;

• Sleepy, The Ajax, and Vixen: Cats rule;

• Start doing Civil War battle reenactments with a group of wacko gun nuts who love to get their rocks off on weekends;

• Meet this awesome girl named Laura; makes me reassess Emily, a girl I had broken up with early in the year;

• Attend the 1974 World Science Fiction Convention in Washington DC, actually vote for Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama as Best Novel;

• Los Angeles seems like a dying city in a dying state;

• Zardoz, and more Zardoz; before the year is over, I end up seeing the film twenty-four times in commercial cinemas and once on a special videotape machine a friend brings home from a local TV studio (and it was very badly panned-and-scanned);

• Start going to a different school with a better English department;

• Learn how to do on-the-fly repairs to a 1972 Datsun 510;

• and so much more.

1973-74 was a great time in our household.
We got our first color television set, putting an
end to our reign as the last remaining family in town
to get one.
It was a Magnavox, and had its own rolling cart.
It is hard to imagine the days of being excited about
that, but...it was pretty damned great.
No remote control, though...that was a whole tv set later.

The rest of the year?
I was a very bored eight year old, in Mrs. Nolan's third grade class, looking forward to seeing what my Saturday cartoons looked like in living color.

Our first TV remote came about this time. It was actually from our local cable system and was a wired remote (really just a channel selector) which consisted of a box about the size of a license plate but about an inch tall with a sliding control that ran along a front edge of the remote. Very high tech!