Crying Leonardo words
From out a silk trombone
I rang a silent bell
It’s a very special time of the year at 2 or 3 lines.
January is gone, and February is here . . . which means that it’s time for 28 Posts in 28 Days™. Happy happy joy joy!
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This year, 28 Posts in 28 Days™ will feature the best albums released during the first half of rock music’s “Golden Decade” – which began the year I entered 7th grade and ended the year I graduate from college.
Next year, 28 Posts in 28 Days™ will focus on the best albums from my college years – 1970 through 1974.
As for the next 28 Posts in 28 Days™ – we’re talking February 2028 – I might feature albums from my law school years. Assuming I’m still alive in February 2028, of course. (I have a condition called “I’m old,” and they tell me there’s no cure for it.)
[Note: for those of you who are new to the 2 or 3 lines party, I should explain what 28 Posts in 28 Days™ is. I used to do 28 themed posts in February – one each day. That got to be too hard, so I cut back to doing 12 themed posts in February. However, I liked the 28 Posts in 28 Days™ name so I kept it. If you took the name too literally, that’s on you!]
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You younger 2 or 3 lines readers may wonder what the hell I’m talking about when I talk about a record album – also known as an LP.
An LP is a big round black thing that plays music. Here’s a picture of one:
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Many years ago, it wasn’t unusual for people to put an album on a turntable and listen to it straight through.
Actually, they’d listen to the first side straight through, then turn the album over and listen to the second side.
Today, people construct playlists that usually contain songs by many different recording artists. In essence, you create your own personalized albums rather than listening to the particular group of songs an artist has chosen to put on an album.
If you want to repeat or skip a song on your playlist, it’s easy to do so. But when all we had were LPs, repeating or skipping songs required some effort – you had to walk over to your record player, pick up the tone arm, and attempt to drop it on the blank groove that preceded the track you wanted to hear. It was much easier just to listen to an album in its entirety.
Unfortunately, most albums were a mixture of good and bad tracks. If you were lucky, the good tracks outnumbered the bad ones – but all too often, the reverse was true. I hate to think how many albums I bought because they had two or three great songs that I had heard on the radio – only to discover that the rest of the album was filler.
While the albums I’m featuring in this year’s 28 Posts in 28 Days aren’t perfect, they’re pretty darn close to it. Sure, you might find a stinker here or there, but the bulk of the albums consists of grade A stuff.
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SPOILER ALERT: there will no Beatles album in this year’s 28 Posts in 28 Days.
That will shock some of you. But I make no apology for that.
The Beatles recorded a lot of great music. But their albums contain a lot of clunkers. None of them are as perfect as the ten albums I’ve chosen to feature this month.
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One other group that didn’t make the cut is the Grateful Dead.
Not every Grateful Dead song sucks. But a lot of them do – including “China Cat Sunflower,” which I stumbled across recently on a Sirius/XM channel.
Robert Hunter said he wrote the song’s lyrics while “I had a cat sitting on my belly, and was in a rather hypersensitive state, and I followed this cat out to – I believe it was Neptune – and there were rainbows across Neptune, and cats marching across the rainbow. This cat took me in all these cat places; there’s some essence of that in the song.”
Author Eric Wybenga said “China Cat Sunflower” has “one of the very few rock-and-roll lyrics (including Dylan’s) that has as much impact on the page as it does sung, if not more. . . . ‘It’s about acid’ does it less justice than the observation that it's about seeing, sensing, and making connections in a sensuous world. Anyone out there remember what it was like to be three years old?”
I don’t remember what it was like to be three years old, but I hope it was nothing like the lyrics to “China Cat Sunflower”:
Look for a while at the china cat sunflower
Proud walking jingle in the midnight sun
Copperdome bodhi drip a silver kimono
Like a crazy quilt star gown through a dream night wind
Krazy Kat peeking through a lace bandanna
Like a one-eyed cheshire, like a diamond-eye jack
A leaf of all colors plays a golden-string fiddle
To a double-e waterfall over my back
Comic book colors on a violin river crying Leonardo
Words from out a silk trombone
I rang a silent bell, beneath a shower of pearls
In the eagle-winged palace of the Queen Chinee
Click here to listen to “China Cat Sunflower.”
Click here to buy the version of “China Cat Sunflower” that was released on the Grateful Dead’s 1969 studio album, Aoxomoxoa.
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