Article Contributed on: 7/1/2007 11:12:13 PM
For some months now - and without any reason I can discover - I've been singing
The Ballad of Rocky Raccoon to my boys in the evening. Well, I've been singing those parts of it I remember, at least. The melody and story line are so intertwined that it becomes difficult for me to remember which part follows which part.
And it's made even more difficult when you take into account the fact that I haven't heard the song in its entirety for at least a dozen years.
Still, it's sung as a story and if you know the story you should know the song, right? Not so in my case...
At any rate, I decided to prove to my kids that I didn't make up the song. (It's actually an unusual proposition if you stop to think about it: I'm going to PROVE to you that I'm copying someone else's work, dagnabbit!) So I put Disc One of the The White Album into my truck CD player this morning.
Cut one: the almost perfect and nearly-timeless Back In The USSR; fast and sexy, it contained a message that we'd have to wait another decade to fully understand. Namely, that there are hot chicks on the other side of the Berlin Wall. And they have "balalaika's" - and we all know what THAT means!
Well, no. Not exactly. But we know what it hinted at. Kinda.
And as difficult as that would be to explain, try telling your 5 year old daughter that she's listening to a song that was recorded when her Father was the age of her youngest brother, by a group that had broken up by the time he was her age, about a country that no longer exists which references an airline which dissolved before the musical group had ever been formed...
But it had a good beat. You could dance to it if your date forced you to...
Chris Stone is a slightly different - hopefully better - Father and man than he was yesterday...