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diff --git a/posts/2024-10-06-tunes-for-flying.php b/posts/2024-10-06-tunes-for-flying.php new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b1a0c6a --- /dev/null +++ b/posts/2024-10-06-tunes-for-flying.php @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +<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. +</p> + +<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> +</p> + +<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> +</p> + +<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: +</p> + +<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> +</p> |