Three Dog Night -- "Celebrate" (1969)

Satin and lace, isn't it a pity
Didn't find time to call
Ready or not, gonna make it to the city
This is the night to go to the celebrity ball

Dress up tonight, why be lonely? . . .
Celebrate, celebrate, dance to the music

 

A 40th high-school reunion in Joplin, Missouri, is hardly a "celebrity ball."  And I doubt that any of the girls I'll see there will be wearing satin and lace.  (Sorry, ladies -- you may be 57 or 58 years old, but it's hard not to think of you as "girls.") 

 

But no matter.  It will still be an occasion to celebrate.  

What exactly will we be celebrating?  Some of us can celebrate success in a career or a business.  (I'm not just talking about money -- I'm talking about the satisfaction you get from doing something well, and the recognition and respect you receive from your customers or your employer or your peers.)  Others can celebrate their children, or grandchildren, and the pride and joy they bring -- and is there anything in life more celebrate-able?

At the very least, we can all celebrate just being here.  Some of us have already survived close calls, and know from very personal experience that life isn't something to be taken for granted.  The fact that so many of our classmates -- not to mention parents and other loved ones -- are no longer around to join the celebration should make that very clear to the rest of us.

What I'm especially celebrating this weekend is growing up in Joplin, where I spent almost every day of the first 18 years of life.   It was what I experienced here that made me the person I am today -- for better and for worse.  

Certainly my parents were the most important influence in my life.  (I'm sometimes told -- not necessarily in a complimentary tone of voice -- that I am getting more like my father every year.  That is absolutely true, and it doesn't bother me a bit -- he and my mother have accomplished a lot with a little, and my sister and I owe them more than we can ever repay.)  

But my teachers (especially Mary Helen Harutun, a truly remarkable and dedicated woman who taught piano to quite a few of us) and especially my friends were very significant influences as well.

I moved to the Washington, DC, area after I finished law school over 33 years ago, so I've lived here a lot longer than I lived in Joplin (even accounting for for brief detours to San Francisco and Philadelphia).  And that's where I got married and where my kids were born and grew up.  

But where I live now is not really my home -- Joplin is, and always will be.  For better or worse (in the words of Little Big Town's "Boondocks"):

You can take it or leave it

This is me

This is who I am     

The last few weeks have really brought that home.  I can't overstate what an impact all the old photos that have been posted to the reunion's Facebook page have had on me.  

I've seen familiar faces that have been lost to me for many years -- I've allowed "out of sight" to become "out of mind" far too easily -- but it turns out those faces were not really forgotten.  Seeing them has triggered all kinds of wonderful and surprisingly intense memories.  And for some reason, the memories that have resurfaced have all been happy ones.

The Dugout Lounge at Mickey
Mantle's Holiday Inn in Joplin

The reunion will be a great opportunity to see many of the friends with whom I have kept in touch over the years.  Just as important, it will be a chance to really connect with other classmates for the first time.  I've already struck up some friendships with people I didn't really know in high school, or that I barely knew, and I hope those friendships will continue in some form after the reunion is over.  

It wouldn't be honest of me if I were to deny that this whole experience has also been somewhat bittersweet. 

One thing the reunion is forcing me (and, I suspect, many others) to do is to to look back and take stock of where I've been and where I am -- and where I'm going as well.  It's impossible for me to look at all those pictures from 40 and even 50 years ago without regrets -- regrets for all the mistakes I've made, regrets for all the things I wish I had done but didn't . . . but mostly regrets from (to quote from a book I recently read) "the realization there [are] a lot more leaves on the ground than on the tree."  

I can't resist sharing some quotes from my favorite poet and my favorite novelist from my high-school days, both of whom had a lot to say on this subject.

From William Wordsworth's "Ode (Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood)":

O joy! that in our embers

Is something that doth live,

That nature yet remembers

What was so fugitive!

The thought of our past years in me doth breed

Perpetual benediction . . .

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind . . .

In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

(I need that "philosophic mind" right now -- I hope I don't have to wait much longer for it to arrive.)

And from "The Great Gatsby" (by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was laid to rest only a few miles from my home, and whose tombstone bears these words):

F. Scott Fitzgerald's tombstone

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.  

That's not altogether a bad thing, in my opinion.  I look at all the pictures on our Facebook page, and realize that life in Joplin when we were young was often wonderfully multilayered and rich.  It was a time of intense curiosity and intense feelings.  To paraphrase the song I quoted earlier, you can take it or leave it -- high school is us, high school is who we are.

Well, that's it from me -- my last post before the reunion.  I've been talking a lot, and now I'm going to concentrate on listening for a change.   I look forward to seeing -- and listening to -- all of you in Joplin (or elsewhere, if you can't make it to the hootenanny).

Get ready to celebrate.  And even if you can't be there in person, you can celebrate our shared history in spirit -- and get started on our shared future.  I hope this song -- the final cut from Three Dog Night's second (and best) album, "Suitable for Framing" -- will help put you in the right mood:

Click on the link below to buy "Celebrate" from Amazon:

Focus -- "Hocus Pocus" (1971)

Yodeadodoyodeadodoyodeadodoyodeadodo

     yodeadodoyodeadodoyo-bab-baaaaa

Yodeadodoyodeadodoyodeadodoyodeadodo

     yodeadodoyodeadodoyo-bab-baaaaa

Ahhhhhh-aaahhhh-aaaaaa-aaaaAAA!

Ohhhhhh-ooohhh-oooooo-oooOOO!

I'm just a man -- flesh and blood -- and I have made some mistakes in my life.  Buying the "Moving Waves" album by Focus was certainly one of them.  

I remember hearing "Hocus Pocus" on the radio a couple of times and being absolutely fascinated by it.  I can imagine myself sitting at a stop sign in Joplin, Missouri, in 1971, slack-jawed and drooling as "Hocus Pocus" exploded out of my radio's speakers.  I thought it was the greatest effing record I had ever heard.

Friday was payday at all the summer jobs I had in Joplin when I was in college, and I would take my paycheck, head to the bank, and then head to whichever discount store (Katz? Walmart?) had the best price on record albums and buy one.  

The problem was that I would buy an album each Friday whether there was one I really wanted or not.  (It was like when our twin daughters were newborns -- it was hell.  And their older brother was just three years older than they were.  So whenever we could line up a babysitter for a Sunday afternoon, you'd best believe we were going to the movies -- whether there was anything good playing or not.  We saw some really lousy movies as a result, but my baby mama -- a/k/a "my wife" -- never complained.)

So one Friday, I walked into the store, a big wad of Benjamins burning a hole in my pocket, and grabbed "Moving Waves" by Focus (they were Dutch), based on the strength of "Hocus Pocus."  

I probably listened to that track a dozen times or so.   I'm not sure I ever made it all the way through the rest of the album, which was almost entirely instrumental.  That's not too surprising when you consider that side two consisted of something called "Eruption" − a 23-minute long adaptation of what is generally considered to be the second opera ever written, Jacopo Peri's Euridice (1600).

By the way, the "words" quoted above aren't something I just made up.  That's the way one of the popular Internet song-lyrics sites renders the opening lines of "Hocus Pocus," which did  crack the Billboard top 10.

Until tonight, I thought that Focus did the theme for the "Miami Vice" TV show.  But that music was performed by Jan Hammer, a Czech who once played keyboards for John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra.  (Wow -- I wasn't even close to being right on that one, was I?  Like I said above, just a man -- flesh and blood . . .)

Nike chose to use "Hocus Pocus" in a brilliant TV commercial that was widely aired during the recent World Cup.  (The music starts about 45 seconds in.)

Without further ado, here's "Hocus Pocus" by Focus:

And here's a video of a competitive tap-dancing group performing to "Hocus Pocus" in a competition.  I can't think of a worse choice for tap-dancing -- it's excruciatingly bad:

Click below to buy "Hocus Pocus" from Amazon:

XTC – "1000 Umbrellas" (1986)

One thousand umbrellas

Upturned couldn't catch

All the rain that drained out 

Of my head when you said

We were over and over 

I cried 'til I floated 

Downstream to a town 

They call Misery

(Oh, oh, Misery)

I know that many of you are eager to know whether the 2 or 3 lines team survived the storms that brought Montgomery County, Maryland, to its knees this past Sunday afternoon.

In case you haven't heard, our area was spanked with torrential rain and winds gusting up to 90 miles per hour at about 4 pm on Sunday.  The storm moved fast – it took less than an hour for the skies to blacken, the rain and winds to move in and then move out, and the skies to turn sunny again.  But that was more than enough to rip our fragile infrastructure a new one.

Over 300,000 people in MoCo lost electricity as a result of the storm.  About half that many were still without power 48 hours later.  Amazingly, the stoplights on a number of major commuting routes are still inoperable.

But the good news is that 2 or 3 lines offices lost power for only a few minutes – although we were without cable TV and internet service for several hours this morning, which was extremely trying.

It could have been worse – that could have been our minivan:

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One very important question remains unanswered: how did the storm affect my regular Sunday bike ride?

Unfortunately, other important tasks and duties prevented me from starting my ride until about 300p, so I found myself squarely in harm's way at 345p or so, when I looked up and noticed the sky was very, very, VERY dark.  

(Another person who lives in my house and has the same last name as I do suggested that I should have left much earlier, that we had gotten e-mails from the county government hours earlier warning us that the storms were rapidly approaching, that it was my own fault I didn't start and finish my ride earlier, yada yada yada.)

I was pickin' 'em up and layin' 'em down on my 24-speed Gary Fisher "Utopia" and less than a mile from my home, sweet home, when a sideways gust of wind almost blew me right off my ride. Then the skies opened up and I was drenched within the 10 seconds or so it took me to find shelter – in this case, the nearest front porch big enough for my bike and I to hide under.  (The owner of the house eventually came to the door and invited me in, but I demurred – given that I was very wet and fairly smelly as well.)

By 500p, the rain had stopped and the sun was out.  I went back to finish my ride, but the paved hiker-biker trail to Lake Needwood was impassible – it was covered with tree limbs and assorted storm-tossed debris.

*     *     *     *     *

I was not optimistic about the condition of that trail when I left for my ride this morning. But lo and behold, someone had gone to "Chain Saws 'R' Us" and cleared the trail of the big stuff.  There were a lot of leaves and small branches and pebbles on the trail, but that kind of stuff isn't enough to stop a hardcore biker like myself.

Imagine my surprise when, as I was returning home, I came upon a diligent county worker driving a tractor equipped with a really big-ass leafblower along the trail, so that there was nary a stick, leaf or cigarette butt left on it the rest of the way.

Needwood trail immaculate thanks
 to big-ass mechanized leafblower

Once he was done with the leafblower, I assume he went back and power-washed any remaining dirt off the trail until it was as clean as my kitchen floor – maybe even as clean as my mother's kitchen floor.

Sorry about all you folks who are still without air conditioning, TV, etc., but it doesn't really help to complain.  Just be happy that I had a wonderful bike ride along an immaculately cleaned trail to a beautiful little lake this morning – it will do you good to think about someone other than yourself for a change!

*     *     *     *     *

I considered but ultimately rejected these songs for this post:

1.  "Stormy" by the Classics IV (not a bad choice, but not very exciting);

2.  "Purple Rain" by Prince (I saw no hint of anything purple during our storm);

3.  "Fire and Rain" by James Taylor (no hint of fire either);

4.  "Summer Breeze" by Seals and Croft ("breeze" isn't really the right word for 90-mph wind gusts);

5.  "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" by B.J. Thomas (the raindrops weren't exactly falling, and they didn't keep falling very long);

6.  "Here Comes the Sun" by the Beatles (yes, it did, but that wasn't the main event);

7.  "Rock You Like a Hurricane" by the Scorpions (captures the feel of the event, but sort of a poopy song);

8.  "Blowin' in the Wind" by Bob Dylan (and covered by every girl in college who owned a guitar -- no thank you);

9.  "Texas Flood" by Stevie Ray Vaughan (geography is way off);

10.  "Texas Tornado" by Doug Sahm (ditto);

11.  "Thunderstruck" by AC/DC (shouldn't it be "lightning-struck"?);

12.  "Riders on the Storm" by the Doors (close, but there was only one rider – and I've already blogged about a Doors song);

13.  "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?" by Creedence Clearwater Revival (I've already blogged about a CCR song, too).

So I chose XTC's "1000 Umbrellas" – which is from a very interesting and very quirky album, "Skylarking," the title of which was inspired by the Shelley poem, "To a Skylark."  

The Skylarking album was released in 1986

My favorite song on the CD is "Season Cycle" – the singer (a limey) pronounces "umbilical" with the accent on the third syllable ("um-bil-LIE-cal"):

Darling, don't you ever stop to wonder
About the clouds, about the hail and thunder
About the baby and its umbilical
Who's pushing the pedal on the season cycle?

Click here to listen to "1000 Umbrellas.'

Click below to buy "1000 Umbrellas" from Amazon:

Three Dog Night -- "One" (1969)

One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do

Two can be as bad as one

It's the loneliest number since the number one

"One" was Three Dog Night's first big hit.  I vividly remember hearing it on the radio while sitting in a Central Missouri State University dorm room during Missouri Boys' State in the summer of 1969.  

I'm not writing about it because it's a perfect little 3-minute AM-radio song ("PL3MAMRS") – although it is – but because I hope I can chase down an old rumor I've wondered about for years.

I heard that the committee that planned the 1969 junior-senior prom at Parkwood was having trouble deciding which of two bands to hire to play at the dance.  The band that was eventually chosen was a local favorite, the Pink Peach Mob (one of whose members, Steve Gaines, later joined Lynyrd Skynyrd and was killed in the 1977 crash of that band's airplane).

The story goes that the other band was Three Dog Night, an up-and-coming California group that would have cost a lot more money to book than the local guys.  Later, of course, Three Dog Night hit it very big, and everyone who went to the dance missed out on being able to bore their friends, co-workers, children, and grandchildren with the story of how a hugely successful band – they had eleven top-10 hits (including three number ones) – had played at their high school prom.

Maybe Three Dog Night was a candidate to play at the 1968 prom, not the 1969 one as I've always heard – looking at the band's recording history, 1968 would work a lot better.  

Surely some of my Joplin readers know whether this is a true story or just an urban legend.  Please -- post a comment and help me clear this up once and for all.

By the way, I see that Three Dog Night played at the Downstream Casino this past July 4 – so they did make it to Joplin, just 42 or so years late.  

*     *     *     *     *

"One" was written by Harry Nilsson, a very good but very odd singer-songwriter.  If you don't believe me, click here and give a listen to his song, "You're Breakin' My Heart":

You're breakin' my heart

You're tearin' it apart

So f*ck you!

Nilsson's biggest hits were "Everybody's Talkin' " (the theme song to the movie "Midnight Cowboy"), "Me and My Arrow," and "Without You," which was a #1 hit in 1971.  But my two favorite Nilsson songs – both from the 1972 Nilsson Schmilsson album – were "Jump Into the Fire" (which was featured during the scene in "Goodfellas" when Ray Liotta is driving all over town with a bunch of guns in his trunk while a helicopter appears to be following him) and "Coconut" (which was featured in the closing credits of "Reservoir Dogs"):

You put de lime in the coconut, you drink 'em both together

Put de lime in the coconut, then you'll feel better 

Click here to watch a truly bizarre video of "Coconut" from a 1971 BBC television special.

*     *     *     *     *

Nilsson released "One" as a single a year before Three Dog Night did.  Click here to listen to his version of the song, which went nowhere – it's a lovely recording, but no chance it was going to get played on the radio in 1968.  

Click here to listen to the Three Dog Night version of "One."

Click on the link below if you'd like to buy the recording from Amazon:

Leon Russell and the Shelter People – "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1971)

How many days
Has it been since I was born?

How many days 'til I die?

I recently wrote about how a number of my high-school friends and I spent much of our youth drinking 3.2% beer at Nina's Green Parrot in Galena, Kansas.  Just click here if you need to refresh your memory, or if you didn't read that post in the first place.

Let's pretend it's late on a Saturday night, and Nina's has closed for the evening.  We've grabbed a tall boy for the road, carefully backed out of our angled parking place (making a U-turn in Galena is a sure way to get ticketed), and found our way back to Route 66 for the return drive to Joplin.  So what now?

It's time to turn on the ol' Zenith and watch Mazeppa, of course!

Dr. Mazeppa Pompazoidi's Uncanny Film Festival and Camp Meeting show – featuring Gailard Sartain (a/k/a Dr. Mazeppa Pompazoidi) – aired on Tulsa television from 1970 to 1973.

Gailard Sartain (a/k/a/"Mazeppa")

The show began after midnight on Saturday nights – after the local news at 10:00 PM and after the late movie.  The "film festival" part of the show was usually an obscure old horror movie.  But the reason we watched were the extended skits and live commercials that Sartain and his sidekicks (the best known of whom was Gary Busey) did during breaks in the movie.

Click here to watch the show's opening (and closing) credit sequence.

*     *     *     *     *

I rarely made it to the closing credits, which usually ran about 2:30 AM.  By that time, I had "fallen asleep" (i.e., passed out) in the recliner in my parents' living room.  

Eventually, I would awaken (thanks to a painfully full bladder), half-blind from the combination of the bright lights I had left on and my failure to remove my contact lenses before "falling asleep."  The Mazeppa show would be long gone, and all that was playing on the TV was a screen full of snow and static.

Tulsa native Gailard Sartain – whose name appeared in the show's credits as "G. Ailard S. Artain" – went on to fame and fortune after his stint as Mazeppa.

Sartain on "Hee Haw"

He is best-remembered as a regular on "Hee Haw" for almost 20 years.  But he also appeared in a number of major motion pictures – including The Buddy Holly Story (he portrayed the Big Bopper, while his Mazeppa pal Gary Busey was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of the title character), Mississippi Burning  (a drama about the 1964 murder of three civil-rights workers that starred Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe), Robert Altman's Nashville, and the neo-noir film The Grifters (where he had a memorable sex scene with Annette Bening).  I also remember him as a regular on The Cher Show in the mid-1970's.  

Last and almost certainly least, he played Jim Varney's sidekick, Chuck, in the "Ernest P. Worrell" movies and television series.  (KnowhutImean?)

*     *     *     *     *

I first stumbled across "Mazeppa" while visiting relatives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.  (That was before my parents got cable.)  

I will never forget a skit titled "The Severed Hand" that was the highlight of the first Mazeppa episode I ever saw.  It started with a short film about a persistent door-to-door salesman, whose hand was severed when he tried to hold a female customer's door open as he continued to pitch her whatever he was selling and the woman (played by a show regular known as Judy Judy) finally just slammed the door shut on him.  

The severed hand fell into a wastebasket, but (with the help of some crude special effects) soon thereafter crawled out and started following the woman around the house.  After a couple of minutes, the hand caught up to the fleeing woman, pounced on her, and grabbed her by the throat – as the screen faded to black and the words "To be continued" appeared.

Sartain and Judy Judy were sitting together on the Mazeppa set when the film ended, pretending to speculate as to what would happen in the next installment of the film.  Sartain reached out toward Judy, supposedly to brush off a small piece of food or some other debris that she was not aware was on her face, but she jerked her head back and slapped his hand away.  He kept reaching for her face until she became so upset that she bit off his entire index finger and spit it out on to the table they were sitting at.  (The camera moved in quickly for a nice, tight close-up of the severed digit – if memory serves, it was the index finger.) 

 After a moment, you realized that Sartain had been reaching for her face with the same fake hand that had been used in the movie – but until that realization dawned on you, you really thought she had really bitten off his real finger.

*     *     *     *     *

Sartain and Busey (who went by the name Teddy Jack Eddy on the show) did a number of memorable skits.  Click here to watch one featuring Sartain as an overbearing high-school coach who is punishing a wise-ass student for his failure to suit up for gym class.

Busey graduated from Nathan Hale HS in Tulsa in 1962, a year before Sartain graduated from Will Rogers HS.  Busey always has been a piece of work.  I once met an old Miami Vice stuntman who had worked as a stuntman on one of Busey's movies, and he reported that Busey was just as crazy as everyone said.  (The stuntman was pretty crazy himself, so that was really saying something.)  This was after Busey's near-fatal and helmet-less motorcycle accident in 1988, which fractured his skull but didn't slow him down much.

Gary Busey as Teddy Jack Eddy

Sartain and his fellow cast members did all the show's commercials live.  Seven-Up was a sponsor, as was the Der Wienerschnitzel fast-food chain and a local store called Rebel Jeans.  Mazeppa used a tag line for the Rebel Jeans spots that parodied the Mattel Toys slogan of that era:  "You can tell they're Ruh-BELL – they're SWELL!" 

I remember that Sartain frequently picked on Bokchito, a tiny town in southern Oklahoma that I used to drive through on my trips to and from college.  For example, while doing a Rebel Jeans commercial, he would pretend to be a truck driver who was delivering a trailer full of tire irons to Bokchito for the annual "Hippie-Hardhat Friendship Festival" there.

When I was an attorney at the Federal Trade Commission in the late 1970s, we had a summer intern from the University of Tulsa's law school.  His father had been one of the news anchors at the station where Sartain and Busey had worked as camera operators before Mazeppa went on the air.  According to this student, the two of them were constantly begging station management to give them a show of their own.  

The two were notorious for their practical jokes.  Once, as the floor manager was counting down the last few seconds of a commercial break before the news anchors would be back on the air, Sartain and/or Busey threw a live snake on to the anchor desk.

*     *     *     *     *

Where did the name "Mazeppa" come from?  I actually researched that at the Rice University library when I was a student there. 

It turned out that Ivan Stepanovych Mazeppa was a 17th-century Ukrainian nobleman and Cossack general who allied with Sweden and Poland in a war against Russia in hopes of winning independence for the Ukraine.  (The Russians won.) 

Byron, Pushkin, and Victor Hugo all wrote long poems about Mazeppa, while Tchaikovsky composed an opera titled Mazeppa and Liszt wrote a symphonic work named for him.

Tchaikovsky's "Mazeppa"

In Byron's poem, Mazeppa is punished for becoming involved with a Polish count's wife by being tied naked to a horse that was sent galloping across the Polish plains – an ordeal that almost killed him.

According to Sartain, he learned about Mazeppa when he found an old newspaper with an article about a 19th-century dancer who had herself bound to a horse that she rode across the stage in honor of Mazeppa.  As for "Pompazoidi," he just made that up.

*     *     *     *     *

Near the end of the Mazeppa TV show's run, the cast travelled to Joplin to put on a live show at Memorial Hall.  I'm not sure how many people in Joplin had cable TV in those days, but I'm pretty sure very few people in Joplin watched the show – except for we happy few, we band of brothers (and sisters) who were returning from a night of beer drinking in Kansas.  

As I recall, about a dozen paying customers showed up for the performance.  Sartain was bitter – he insulted Joplin and everything Joplin-related over and over, complaining that he hadn't taken in enough from ticket sales to even pay the Will Rogers Turnpike tolls back to Tulsa.  (He even passed the hat – I recall that some wisenheimer contributed a comb.)  

For many years, I had a small poster advertising that Joplin show.  (Sartain is a cartoonist of the R. Crumb school, and he may have personally drawn that poster.)  I need to do some serious exploring at my parents' house this weekend to see if I can locate that bad boy.

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Click here to go to the "Tulsa TV Memories" webpage about the Mazeppa show – there's a lot of stuff here.

And click here to go to the official Mazeppa website.  It offers four DVDs full of Mazeppa's skits – I have the first three, but haven't watched much of them.  (I'm a little afraid of being disappointed.)  

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Leon Russell (real name: Claude Russell Bridges) was also an Oklahoma native, and like Sartain he attended Will Rogers HS in Tulsa.  

Russell once appeared on Mazeppa, but there seems to be no recording of that episode, so his performance is lost forever.  (Who knows?  Maybe he performed this very song.)

And before he became an actor, Gary Busey played drums on some of Russell's records (under the "Teddy Jack Eddy" pseudonym that he later used on Mazeppa).  Since the rules are that each post on this blog starts off with lines from a song I like, a Leon Russell song seemed like a good choice for this one.

Leon Russell

Russell has had a long and storied career as a session musician, songwriter, and solo artist.  He's performed with everyone – Eric Clapton, Elton John, George Harrison, Glen Campbell, Willie Nelson, Joe Cocker, and Bob Dylan, among others.  

I particularly like his two rather obscure albums with Marc Benno.  They called themselves the Asylum Choir, and you'll be hearing more about one of their songs someday soon.  

I could go on and on about Russell and this song, but it's late and I have many posts to do before I leave for my 40th high school reunion.  So if you want to know more, just enter "Leon Russell" into Google and knock yourself out.

Click here to listen to "Stranger in a Strange Land."

Click on the link below here if you'd like to buy the song from Amazon: