path: root/posts/2024-10-06-tunes-for-flying.php

<h1>Tunes for Flying</h1>


<p class="description">
	Each time I travel by airline I have a take-off/landing playlist. These three songs are always at the top of the list.
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<h2>"Treat Her Right" by Roy Head - The Take-Off</h2>

<p>
I first heard "Treat Her Right" in Tarantino's <em>Once Upon a Time in Hollywood</em>. It opens the movie with a bunch of cuts of a reimagine Sharon Tate on her way back to California. It's full of old fashioned flying with well-dressed stewards and classy dining on a Pan Am jumbo jet. It's a romantic vision of flight with 1960s rose-colored glasses. No waiting in a TSA line to get scanned as characters make their way through the airport and cruise along the highway. It's an idyllic way to travel that I never got to experience. I like to pretend that's the kind of flying I'm doing instead of reclining 2.5" in shorts and trying not to get airsick. <em>6/10 for imagined nostalgia, "treat her real gentle."</em>
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<h2>"Comin' in on a Wing and a Prayer" by Anita Ellis, The Song Spinners, or The D-Day Darlings</h2>

<p>
I get to call flying a nuisance instead of a battle for survival. The carburetors on my '53 Hudson were rebuilt and jetted by Walt Mordenti, a WWII vet who served as a mechanic on B-17 bombers. I figure if he could keep a B-17 aloft he was the right guy to tune and set my carbs for my application. Anyway there's a pretty famous song from back in the day called "Comin' in on a Wing and a Prayer." The most popular version would probably be the one performed by the Andrews Sisters. Recently I discovered the D-Day Darlings' performance with more fiddle and swing. It tells the same story of a bomber crew making their way back to base "with one motor gone." It's incredibly catchy despite the over-processing and tells a good story. Always amps me up for some reason. <em>9/10 for the feels, "what a show, what a fight."</em>
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<h2>"Promised Land" by Chuck Berry - The Touchdown</h2>

<p>
Back in California or rather on the arduous journey there, Chuck tells the story of a po' boy trying to get from Norfolk, Virginia to Los Angeles. The trip starts on a bus which breaks down in Alabama, transitions to a train running across Mississippi, and eventually to a plane over Albuquerque. It's the last verse that always gets me going:
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<blockquote>
...in thirteen minutes he'd set us at the terminal gate
Swing low chariot, come down easy, taxi to the terminal zone
Cut your engines and cool your wings, let me make it to the telephone
Los Angeles, give me Norfolk, Virginia, give me Tidewater 1009
Tell the folks back home this is the Promised Land Calling and the po' boy is on the line
</blockquote>

<p>
Every time I land out of state these lyrics shoot through my head. I'm a Tidewater native and I always send word back thereabouts to Norfolk Virginia when we touch down. <em>8/10 my airport is best airport, "swing low chariot, come down easy."</em>
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