Steppenwolf – "Born To Be Wild" (1968)

I like smoke and lightnin’

Heavy metal thunder!

A couple of years ago, I told you about teaching the following lyrics from the Spiral Staircase’s 1969 hit, “More Today Than Yesterday,” to my oldest grandson, Jack – who was not quite three years old at the time:

I love you more today than yesterday

But not as much as tomorrow

I was surprised when my daughter sent me a video of Jack singing those lines to his little brother Hunter a few days later:

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Jack has picked up the lyrics to several other sixties pop hits from me since then – including Spanky and Our Gang’s “Lazy Day”:

Baby, you and me 

And the honey bee 

Lazy day, lazy day

But the song that he really latched on to is Steppenwolf’s stick-of-dynamite classic, “Born To Be Wild.”

What can I say?  The kid has good taste!

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Last night, Jack and Hunter were at my house for dinner and a bath.

When I heard Jack singing “Born To Be Wild” while playing with his toy cars, I called him into my home office so we could watch a Youtube video that featured the song accompanied by Easy Rider footage of Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson riding motorcycles.

Today I got this message from my daughter (Jack’s mother):

Jack said he taught his whole [daycare] class the “Born To Be Wild” song today!  He told [his wonderful Polish-American daycare provider] what it was called so she could type it into her computer, and then they found the video with the motorcycles.  She had never heard the song.  Jack  said the whole class loved it, especially Mack. 

Jack – who will turn five in July – is the oldest child in his daycare group.  Mack is about a year younger.  There are two girls about Mack’s age, then Jack’s brother Hunter (who is two and a half) and a couple of younger kids.

I believe that Mack loved “Born To Be Wild” – Jack is a Pied Piperish figure for Mack – but I doubt that the youngest kids (at least one of them isn’t old enough to walk yet) were really into it.

Here’s Jack singing “Born To Be Wild” while playing in his basement: 

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Click here to see the Youtube video that I showed Jack, and that he had his daycare provider play for all his little friends.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Spiral Staircase – "More Today Than Yesterday" (1969)

I love you more today than yesterday

But not as much as tomorrow

When I pick my grandson Jack up at day care, I usually sing along to the SiriusXM ’60s on 6 channel during the short drive to his home. 

A few weeks ago, today’s featured song popped up on that station.  Jack isn’t even three years old yet, and I wasn’t sure if the lines from the song that are quoted above would make any sense to him.  

But I started half-saying, half-singing those lines to Jack when I said goodbye after dropping him off at home.  I’m not sure if those lines are really true – do I really love Jack more today that I loved him yesterday? – but I thought it was a nice way to tell him how much I loved him, and might give him something to think about, too.

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Earlier today, my daughter Sarah – Jack’s mother – sent me two short videos of Jack singing to his baby brother Hunter, who just turned six months old.  To say that I was surprised by what Jack did in those videos is the understatement of the century.

Here’s the first video:

Here’s the second one:

(Note how Jack has captured the essential rhythm of these lyrics – the way he pronounces “yesterday” and “tomorrow,” and the pause between the two lines.)

Jack never really reacted to my singing those song lyrics to him – he certainly never sang along with me, or repeated the lines back to me.  

I hadn’t told anyone else about my reciting those lyrics as a goodbye catchphrase.  My daughter had no idea that I was doing that, so she couldn’t have prompted him to sing the lines to Hunter while she recorded him.

Jack has always seemed very taken with little Hunter – he stays pretty close to him when both boys are at home, and I’ve never seen him exhibit any jealousy or resentment when we are paying more attention to Hunter than to him.  But I can’t quite comprehend how his not-quite-three-year-old brain figured out that the song lyrics about love that I recited to him were appropriate for him to sing to his brother.  

I’ve been blessed with four grandsons, and a fifth is on the way – perhaps I’ll be fortunate enough to have even more grandchildren in the future.  I have a feeling there are other little miracles like this one in store for me, and I am very much looking forward to them.

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The Spiral Starecase’s “More Today than Yesterday” made it to #12 on the Billboard “Hot 100” in 1969.  

Pat Upton in 2013

In 2013, the group’s frontman, Pat Upton, talked to a newspaper reporter about writing the song:

I wrote “I Love You More Today Than Yesterday” in a motel room in Las Vegas.  I was thinking about Bobby Goldsboro singing it when I first wrote it.  Musically, I had a chord progression in my head, and I knew the only way I’d ever get to use it was if I wrote a song around it.  [The group recorded the song and] three months later, it took off.

After the Spiral Starecase broke up, Upton became a session musician and a member of Ricky Nelson’s band for a few years.  

On December 30, 1985, Nelson performed at Upton’s club in Guntersville, Alabama.  He was scheduled to play at a big New Year’s Eve show in Dallas, and invited Upton to join them, but Upton declined.  Nelson’s plane – a 40-year-old DC-3 with a history of mechanical problems – crashed about two miles from the airport where it was supposed to land, killing Nelson, his girlfriend, his manager, and all four members of his band.

Here’s a photo of Upton and Nelson taken just before Nelson’s ill-fated flight took off:

Upton died in 2016 at the age of 75.  I wish I had been able to share these videos of Jack with him – he had six grandchildren of his own, so I’m sure he would have enjoyed them.

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In 1889, the 18-year-old Rosemonde Gérard wrote the following lines to Edmond Rostand, a young playwright (he wrote Cyrano de Bergerac) whom she would soon marry:

Car, vois-tu, chaque jour je t’aime davantage,

Aujourd’hui plus qu’hier et bien moins que demain.

French poet Rosemonde Gérard

One English-language dictionary of quotations translates those lines as follows:

For, you see, each day I love you more,

Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.

Years later, a French jeweler came up with the idea of making a medallion engraved with an abbreviated version of the verse.  

The medallion depicted below reads has a plus sign followed by qu’hier, a minus sign, and que demain – in other words, “more than yesterday, less than tomorrow.”

The plus and minus signs on these medallions are often enhanced with gemstones – a romantic poem is all well and good, but diamonds are a girl’s best friend!

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Click here to listen to “More Today Than Yesterday.”

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.

Amboy Dukes – "You Talk Sunshine, I Breathe Fire" (1968)

What you gonna do 

When the bubble bursts?

On July 22 at 6:00 am, my very pregnant daughter Sarah woke up and immediately knew it was time to eight, skate, and donate to the hospital before her bubble burst and my first grandson fell out.

So she and husband drove to the hospital (which is twenty minutes away if all goes well), dealt with the usual I-need-to-see-your-insurance-card hospital bureaucrats, and got to a labor and delivery just in time for Sarah to deliver my grandson Jack at 7:10 am.

My grandson Jack on the day he was born

There was no time for the hospital staff to give Sarah an epidural anesthetic, so she had to tough it out au naturel.

But she handled the whole thing – as she had handled her entire pregnancy – with total aplomb.  In fact, I think it’s fair to say that Sarah is about the aplombest new mother you ever did see.

I for one was very happy at Sarah and Jack’s timing because I was about to leave town and drive to Cape Cod for my annual summer vacation.  My grandson’s birth delayed my departure by a few hours, but I didn’t complain a bit.  (My mother’s comment on my decision to hit the road: “How could you leave that pretty little boy?”)

The three-week-old Jack

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I thought long and hard about what song to feature in this very important 2 or 3 lines.

I could have featured one of the 89 songs I found with “Jack” in the title: e.g., Billy Joel’s “Captain Jack,” The Who’s “Happy Jack,” Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road, Jack,” John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane,” or the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” to name just a few.

Another option would have been to feature a song by a musician who shared Jack’s July 22 birthday: e.g., George Clinton, Bobby Sherman, or Don Henley.

The lyrics of “You Talk Sunshine, I Breathe Fire” are very marginally related to the content of today’s 2 or 3 lines, but that’s enough given what a killer song it is.

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The Amboy Dukes are best-known for their 1968 hit, “Journey to the Center of the Mind.”  It was what I like to call a stick of dynamite.

The band’s follow-up single, “You Talk Sunshine, I Breathe Fire,” which failed to crack the top 100 in the U.S., is almost as good.  But it had totally escaped my notice until a couple of weeks ago.

“You Talk Sunshine, I Breathe Fire” was never released on an Amboy Dukes LP, but was included as a bonus track when the group’s second album was released on CD.  (Saints be praised!)

Click here to listen to “You Talk Sunshine, I Breathe Fire.”